Professions

A majority of my money comes from my professions. I leveled with two gathering professions, herbalism and skinning. At 80, I switched from Skinning to Mining. Now, most of my money comes from Alchemy and Inscription. If you are either new to the game or are leveling on a new server, you should pick up a profession as soon as you can. The earlier the better, and leveling professions as you level your character is a lot easier than leveling professions at 80. If you have professions, you don't necessarily have to drop them to pick up the professions I talk about. You can make money with just about any profession. If you want to chose a new profession, whether it be because you don't enjoy your profession or because your servers economy doesn't have room for you to use it to profit, you can. I will have posts on what professions to choose and why. In my opinion, you have two options if you're leveling a new character. Either two gathering professions, or one gathering profession and one production profession. As far as gathering professions go, I'd recommend Skinning and something, rather than herbalism and mining together. The reason for this is because you cannot track both minerals and herbs at the same time, so you won't be able to find both as easily. There will be posts later with more details about crafting professions.

Here are some pairs that work well:

Jewelcrafting/Mining

Blacksmithing/Mining

Alchemy/Herbalism

Inscription/Mining

Tailoring/Enchanting*

There are others, remember to be creative and not always choose the cookie cutter combinations. If you have money to sponsor your professions, you can do whatever you want to, because you wont have to worry about supplying the production profession.

*The reason two crafting professions work well here is because you will get mats for tailoring from leveling as drops from humaniods (cloth), and this will allow you to "produce" mats for enchanting in the form of green items to DE. Tailoring isn't great for money, but Enchanting is pretty good. I wouldn't really recommend this combination, but if it benefits your class or playstyle, it is still a viable option for moneymaking.

More to come!