Today we removed the ability to enter new purchase orders for all games and worlds currently supported by Sparter. Existing orders will continue to completion, and may be accessed by visiting the My Account area.

Going forward, we believe the best course for our business is to focus solely on providing marketplaces with the full support of game developers and publishers.

Short announcement, and no notice sent by e-mail to its users. I wonder what caused the change of practice for this company to undertake this change? Anyways if you want to read the full article you can find it here.  As for me due to the lack of interest in people wanting to buy gold in the recent months, I’ve cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft finally.  I’ll be moving on to Age of Conan with a bunch of friends.  By the way that game starts up today if you picked up the early access key =).

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December Totals: $176.06

• Sparter – $144.40
• Cashcrate – $7.91
• Clickbank – $16.61
• Adsense – $5.07
• Squidoo – $2.07

November Totals: $19.84

• Clickbank – $16.37
• Adsesnse – $3.47

For 2007 it looks like I made about $1799.32 cents.

Not bad for part time blogging, and most of the time playing games. I couldn’t seem to win any money yet from Moola, but there seems to be people cashing out $10-20 daily. Most I’ve gotten to was about $5 or so before I started losing games. I think I’m just going to spin the daily wheel, and hope for some money that way instead. I’ll add Moola to the list of earnings when I receive payment, and not before though.

Selling gold from World of Warcraft via Sparter seems to be the way to go right now, but I do want to learn other ways of making money online. I wish Sparter had an affiliate referral program of sorts. I noticed I was getting some hits from an ip in China with a small time gold seller’s domain, which clicked on the Sparter exit links alot. I also now see them listing their rates now on Sparter so if I missed out on some major referral monies I’ll be very sad =P.

Cashcrate was a little surprise since I haven’t logged into it for over a month, and then out of the blue I get a notice saying a referral of mine has reached payout. Its nice to know that there’s passive ways of making money online too. Just let the search engines catch your Cashcrate reviews from these blogs to generate revenue. One thing I did notice though, the post that received a lot of attention was the Cashcrate check picture(it had the most referral exit clicks). It seems like more than anything people want to know if you’re actually going to receive a payment rather than the program itself. The previous post I made about Cashcrate didn’t get many referrals, but once the proof was up I got about 5 people who signed up within the week. I need to make a note of that when doing reviews of any site, to also include the payment proofs to convince more people to sign up under me.Clickbank was the result of an Adwords driven sale, and not one of the guide book links I had up on my old blog. I hope to replicate the sale by finding other products among their list. I spent about $3 dollars on Adwords to get the sale selling Valkor’s Gold Guide. However the search demand for it wasn’t as high as I’d hope. I need to learn more about keyword researching to make better Adword ads. The good thing though is that I’m in the black with that campaign.

So what can I do now to increase my monthly take. Lets see, I’ve joined up with Amazon, and planning on reapplying this blog to Azoogle now that its on its own host. I hear great things about Azoogle’s pay per lead programs so I’ll look into those as well. Also since I moved over to this domain, I’ve been able to add some 125×125 slots up on the top right. I plan to sell some of those slots as I get build more traffic and readers. Chris over at MattNutts(No not Matt’s Nuts) created a Blog ad market called Focial.com. Which is kind of like an Ebay style method of selling ads via bids. When I decide to sell another slot on there I’ll post about it here to let you all know. I even saw someone selling Entrecard credits on there. He’s even got a referral program starting up so get in before everyone else signs up. There’s currently a listing for a 125×125 ad space from a PR 4 blog for only $5/month bid last I checked.

In the mean while I’m starting to gett a little addicted to blogging so hopefully that means I’ll write some more posts. The busiest part of the season for my day job just finished up, so I should have a little more time after I get home from work to blog. Also I’ve been thinking about putting up a small arcade on this site, but that’s another day.

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Some interesting information from the interview for me was these points from Dan Kelly:

Globally there is a 2 billion dollar per year business for digital items in all the online games, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story, mainly centered on games in the Korean, North American and European markets.

Imagine that, a whole economy worth 2 billion dollars that could basically be erased if someone formatted each game company’s hard drive.

A typical seller makes enough to play World of Warcraft for free – about $200 a year – but some make a lot more than that.

I chuckled at this one since I find making gold fairly easily. Why would someone just make a few hundred, and leave? I guess the answer to that is that I know a lot of people who stop playing wow, and just sell off their gold/characters never to come back to the game again.

Some guilds in WoW, for example, only want to raid. They prefer to buy the gold they need and focus their time — 20-50 hours per week — on the parts of the game they love most. This is not a bad thing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. I remember raiding with a not so full guild, and we were always hurting for certain classes or consumables. While hard core role players hate people who just buy a lvl 70 character or buy gold just to get mounts or gear instead of instancing. There are times when those people just shut up just to have that extra player or character around. This way the whole guild can experience end game raids, and get further ahead. The 20-50 hours a week raiding adds up, and when you have to farm for repair costs or consumables you either have to play WoW full time, make a lot of gold efficiently, or straight up buy gold to stay ahead in progress.

We think that online communities will continue to grow at very attractive rates. As they get bigger, more people will want to trade. And the secondary markets will have to be there because otherwise they’re absence will hold back the growth of the primary markets.

The black market for gold in World of Warcraft or currency in other games will always exist as long as it takes a certain amount of time required to maintain a character. The key is the time required to acquire those items. There’s no black market currency for games like Dota, Team Fortress, Counterstrike since all players start out equal with items being reset at each session. However once you start involving time or ranks a market will appear to sell that service to save you time. Even if one were to try, and stop a virtual black market. They would just find another way to sell the services without getting caught.

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1. Aion Online – Live Status Tools – Freaking Awesome

Since launching earlier this year, Sparter has succeeded in transforming the landscape of trade in virtual goods. As a Sparter seller, you have been a key contributor to this success.

We have continually been making changes to meet the needs of our buyers and sellers. Just in the past month we have offered new market pricing charts, seller profile pages displaying your offers (with unique URLs), and alerts that allow buyers to ’subscribe’ to their favorite sellers.

Today, we want to inform you of other changes we are making to Sparter – changes intended to allow us to stay competitive in attracting more buyers for your offers, and to keep Sparter the safest place to trade.

Effective November 1, 2007, Sparter’s commission on completed trades will be 20%. In addition, disbursements will now be processed semi-monthly – sellers will be disbursed on the 15th and last day of each month, for sales credited in the previous period. For example, the proceeds from a sale credited on November 10 would be disbursed on November 30.

We are confident that these changes are necessary to allow Sparter to remain the easiest and safest place to trade virtual goods. We understand these changes will impact your business on Sparter, thus we are informing you now so that you may incorporate them into your plans for the future.

Thank you for using Sparter.

So I was under the impression that I was going to hoard my gold till the prices come up to sell them. Now I get an e-mail from Sparter stating that the commission rate is going up to a whopping 20% on each sale. So if I sell 1k gold at $50(the current market price), I would get only $40). While it might not seem like much, as I mentioned before I have about 10k gold meaning I would lose out about $100. Also payouts are now bi-monthly instead of nightly.

Now I’m trying to figure exactly what I should do. Sell what I got now or wait till afterwards. This move will probably make gold farming companies happy as player to player trades cut out the middle man. However in light of this news I kind of expect the prices to hit rock bottom as people try to sell their products before the big 20% commission rate kicks in. Or I can just sit, and wait and charge an extra 10% once the new rate kicks in. Decisions, decisions.

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As I wait for the prices to go back up again here’s another gold making freebie. Rightfully dubbed ‘Time is of the Essence’. This tip is for people who use the auction house a lot.

If you haven’t already noticed, real life coincides greatly with what happens in the game. If you’ve participated in raids then you have felt the crunch of school/work then go home raid/sleep. People who watch the auction carefully also pick up on patterns in the market, and I’ll break it down into the seven days of the week. The World of Warcraft week starts on Tuesday also known as the reset or patch day.

Tuesday – Raid Instance Reset, Patch Day, PVP Arena Armor

This is one of the bigger auction house days for me as a jewel crafter. The PVP players get their nice brand new PVP gear that they earned from arena points today, which means they’ll need nice shiny +12 stam gems @ 50-60g a pop. Other items that sell well is Enchanting & Enchanting materials. Check the Auction House (AH) for good deals before today (even buy it out Monday), and sell it to people who need them on Tuesday. Raiders also go into instances on this day getting new armors as well. Over all this is a good day for the following professions:

1. Jewelcrafters – New armor means new gems they need to socket with
2. Enchanters – New armor/weapons means they’ll need enchants
3. Leatherworkers – people want Cobrahide Leg Armor or Clefthide Leg Armor and the materials to make them
4. Alchemists – last minute raid consumables sell well, as well as end of the night restocking
5. Tailors – Mystic Spellthread and Silver Spellthread and the materials for them sell well
6. Herbalists – Herbs for the better selling consumables will sell. Look up materials for health/mana potions, Major Agility Elixirs, and Flasks to narrow down what to gather.
7. Engineer – Used to do well for repair bots… Not since Burning Crusade though.

• Buy up cheap materials today – There will be left over short bids on items if it was a patch day. Bid on items that you can resell later or pick up cheaper materials by bidding instead of buying out. The longer the patch the better chance to pick up an item for cheaper. The best day for this is Monday the night before a major patch.

Wednesday – Raid Day #2

There’s no significant day about this one except that many guilds will have a second raid day on Wednesdays. Also a few stragglers will pick up their pvp gear today. The above items sell sell okay, but not as much as Tuesday.

Thursday – Raid Day #3 – Auction House items depleted somewhat

Many guilds either skip Thursday to break or continue raiding. Some will break off to do pvp or instances or start farming consumables for raids. What do you do on this day?

• Mark up your items a little more – By this day in the week the items on the AH is a little depleted. You can mark up your items a little more, but keep the number of items on the AH lesser. You won’t move as much items today, but you can get higher prices for them. Consumables for raids do so-so today as people start restocking for the Friday/Saturday raid groups.

Friday – Raid or Get a life day

Friday is the end of the real life work week, and also the end of the school week. You’ll see people you don’t see during the week due to ‘busy life’ etc starting to show up. AH items start off selling at a good price early Friday, but the prices start dropping as more and more people log in to start their play time for the weekend. The player base basically splits into two groups today. The hard core raiders will raid, and the people who want to have some sort of life outside of World of Warcraft will go out.

• Watch for good deals on the AH – the price wars start today on auction house items. You’re Thursday auction items will probably get sold at a good price, but don’t count on it today.
• Good day for raiding consumables, but watch the bid/buyout prices.
• Professions people do so-so today, but usually better off on Sunday.

Saturday – Raid or Get a life day 2 – Farmers Galore – Barren Chat Day 1

Saturday is many people’s day off so you’ll see people struggling to farm gold/materials, run instances, pvp for pvp honor bonuses. Auction house prices tend to dive on Saturday as the supply is pretty good on gathered items. Crafted items, depending on server populations, can do well here. If you have a rare or uncommon profession recipe, and is logged on today you can sometimes monopolize the market. Server is usually crowded all day, and well the annoying Barrens chat fills up the trade channel so that sitting there announcing your wares is kind of moot.

• Check the Auction House for good deals on materials that can resold later in the week for profit
• Check rare or harder to make craftables on the Auction House, as some regulars won’t be on to put them up. If you’re the only one putting them up today then feel free to mark it up and profit.

Sunday – Raid Day Commences – Pvp Holiday continues – Big Auction House Day #2

Sunday is my second biggest Auction house day, and I’m not sure why. Here are my speculations though based on what I sell:

• Leftover enchant/gemming needed – some people just can’t find the stuff they need on Saturday so that demand is still there Sunday.
• Late night sessions – People play till late in the night Saturday so they just log off without restocking or enchanting/gemming their stuff
• Pvp Honor gear – I notice alot of stamina gems selling today, probably due to people playing all day Saturday to collect honor for the Veteran/Warlord Pvp sets.

Sunday becomes a good day for crafting. For gatherers, there is alot of surplus herbs, and ore today so unless you need the cash I’d wait till later in the week to sell gathered items. Sunday also is a day that many people will start raiding again so you see many people with new raid armor needing enchants/kits/gems.

Monday – Careful of what you put up on AH – Leftover weekend surplus – last minute raid/pvp day

Monday is the day many guilds will try to finish up a raid instance, or people try to put in the 10 games for the pvp arena points. Its relatively quite with alot of surplus supplies from the weekend still flooding the market. Its a good day to buy stuff to resell on Tuesday-Thursday.

I put a big Careful up top for a good reason. Tuesday is sometimes a BIG patch day. What does this mean for Auction House people? Make sure your minimum bids are set higher than normal or to something you can accept as a sell price. If the server goes out for 12 hours, the last person who bid 10g on your 100g item will win it for 10g during the server down time. This is why I stress to be careful on what you put up today.

• Monday is also one of the best days to low ball bid everything hoping to win those expensive items that other people put up. Only bid on stuff you know you can resell later though.
• Setup your Tuesday gem/armor kits/enchanting materials Monday night to get the first dibs on people who buy on Tuesday. Check back on Tuesday to adjust your sell prices if someone came in and underbid you on something your trying to sell.

Long post, but if you want to make money on the Auction House in World of Warcraft, this is one of the more important things to learn early on. As for how I’m doing on my gold? Its been about 13 days since my last post, and I’m at almost 9k gold, hopefully prices go back up so that I don’t have 30k gold sitting in my bank again.

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Anyways a week or so ago I said I was going to create a landing page for World of Warcraft gold guide. So far I’ve been getting some hits to it, but no actual sales. I think I’m going to rethink or rework the page or maybe tryout one of the other Clickbank guides to sell if this one doesn’t do well. If I’m really going to make it from gamer to making a living online I need to get the affiliate marketing thing down. So if anyone has got some tips to share with me please feel free to drop me a note.

Back to World of Warcraft though. I guess I can give a freebie on how I make this amount of gold. Currently I’m alt tabbed out of the game waiting for my mail to finish up opening up. In the 12 minutes I’ve been online I have collected 1125g from yesterday’s sales. Nice huh?
You can ignore that earned/hr part since I was only logged in for 12 minutes or so.

Everyday I earn gold via the auction house. My character is a 375 Jewelcrafter with most of the recipes. What I basically buyout the whole auction house of Adamantite Ore to prospect, and then resell the gems (blue and green). Two useful mods that you will probably need is Auctioneer, and CT Mailmod.

Check the prices of all the blue quality gems on the auction house. That way you can figure out what price you need to buy the ore at. (average on my server is 12g for Talasite up to 55g for Star of Elune). On my server this comes out to about 20g/stack of Adamantite ore.

Prospect all the ore that I get, and vendor the dust (I don’t have time to make it into mercurial stuff)

Cut and sell all the gems and list them on the Auction House at cheaper than what everyone else sells it for. Auctioneer will let you put up multiple items with ease and speed. Also it will also calculate the price so you can beat everyone Else’s price on there. Very handy, and otherwise it would be too time consuming to do this method without the mod. Best selling gem is Solid Star or Elune followed by Glowing Nightseye, and Runed Living Ruby.

That’s it, that’s all I do. Thought it was going to be hard? I have a few other tricks up my sleeve to make gold, but this is by far the most efficient for me. Drawback to this is its huge start up cost (around 7k to get 375 JC with all the recipes). As time goes on I’ll post some other ways to make gold easily on the game. Anyways that’s all for now I’ve got gems to cut.

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My name is Mitch from the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Born and raised here, and well rather bored since all we got is beaches, oceans, and alot of tourists. I’m a father, a whole sale sales person, and an avid video gamer. I’m starting up this blog as a means to try and stop wasting my time gaming, and start earning some extra cash online. So as the very first thing for me to do to get myself out of a game, that I have been playing for the past 4 odd years I’ve decided to sell my World of Warcraft (WoW) gold.

Playing a game for 4 years lets you amass quite a bit of fortunes. You do hear of people successfully making money even while playing (Forbes Article). Anyways my goal was to liquidate my items in the game. As it happens that very week I decided to do this, Slashdot posted up an article about a player to player site called Sparter where I could sell my gold. The last 2 months have been me slowly liquidating my WoW gold into cold hard cash. So for anyone who says gaming doesn’t pay. You can check out how much I made from it on the side there.

Only downside to Sparter is that they will charge you 10% on each sale you make. However you are able to set your own prices to compensate. You don’t need to spam forums or have to accept a cheap price from one of the many WoW gold sites that only give you half or 1/4 value of what your product is worth. Payment system on sparter is very nice. Sparter will act as an escrow for the 2 players. All buyers must pay ahead of time, and sellers will get their money from sparter once the transactions are done. My preferred payment is paypal, and sparter pays out nightly(24hr after a confirmed delivery) even on weekends.

I’ll be keeping track of my earnings from different things from now on so wish me luck on my project. =)

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