This post marks the first in what will be an ongoing series of "Key to Success" posts. At this stage I am hoping to post one of these per week and they will be aimed at highlighting the fundamentals that any aspiring auction house goblin should know and use. So anyway, one with number 1...
Taking advantage of multiple markets.
The long and the short of it
Up first is a relatively uncomplicated concept to understand and implement. The short story is basically that if you sell across more than one market instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, you will make a lot more gold. Diversification is the key to big time results for the simple reason that if one market tanks you still have several other markets to keep your profits solid until it recovers. In effect if you find an area is in a major slump your daily/weekly/monthly profits will not be too badly affected. On the other hand, if you have everything invested into one market and the bottom falls out due to whatever reason you are basically screwed.
How to go about it
Research is the key to success in diversification, find areas that will provide consistent sales on your server and then climb on board the gravy train. Finding these multiple markets does not necessarily mean finding the three or four biggest volume markets on your server as these typically have the most competition and are often rife with deep undercutting and generally frustrating behavior. The strategy that I have found to work best is to focus on a single big ticket area (in my case glyphs) as well as a bunch of smaller areas as well (bags, enchanting rods, darkmoon cards, ore shuffling, flipping etc).
This is a rough breakdown of my recent sales on the auction house from The Undermine Journal (a fantastic resource and awesome to see it back in action!). As it shows, I get a majority of my sales from the glyph market with about 1/3 coming from other sources.
In my regular travails around the wow blogosphere I found a paragraph written by Markco over at his awesome site Just My Two Copper which sums up how to successfully diversify perfectly:
"Keep in mind that diversification does not mean equal attention to all markets. You should plan and set different amounts of crafting depending on which markets perform the best. No different then investing in the stock market, you wouldn't put all your money into the worst performing stock nor would you put equal amounts into every stock you invest in. Diversify but put intelligent analysis behind it."
That last sentence is the kicker. Backup whatever moves you chose to make with adequate research and analysis and you can't go wrong.
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