Guides for Jewel, Black Smithing, Fishing, Cooking,

[Werderx]

My personal gold guide:
get two gathering professions (mining and skinning or herbalism) and go farming.
With mining I collected over 140 obsidium ore and 100 elementium ore in a bit more than one hour in Deepholm at 4 am. This would be worth more than 1500 gold currently on my server. Not to mention green jewels (mainly jaspis) that are worth 60-100 gold each.

There are moments where your time best spent is gathering, times where materials are very low price so you buy them to craft for a profit or sell them later when they are priced high, and flipping the AH usually is always a good time investment. A good gold strategy would be to incorporate all 3 aspects with diversity in each.

How you determine which is better to go with depends on how much time it takes you to accomplish each. You take how much gold you would make and divide that number by how much time it would take. While leveling, it is usually most beneficial to you to do gathering because you don't make gold from too many low level items. When you hit max level, you drop something and power level a profession (which usually eats up what you would made along the way, but takes less time).

Outside of the first week or 2 that Cata was out, when people were trying to get realm first crafting achievements, I haven't found gathering to make more money than flipping or crafting items. Even when stacks of ore were 200g each, I would buy them, make a belt or Breastplate, and sell it for 15 to 25k. This means that I made 20ish thousand gold for 10 minutes worth of work. Granted there were still the orbs, but those came as a side bonus from doing other things. If I was running heroics strictly for the orbs, then I would have to put that Hour of time in there as well. Anywho, I did this over and over until there was no more demand for it... then I moved on to other professions, while still flipping items on the AH the entire time.

Hope this gives some of the people in here a more rounded idea of how to make gold. There are guides and blogs and websites all over the internet that talk about nothing except making gold in wow.

One for instance is:
http://theunderminejournal.com/ (which was introduced to me by Chaos in another thread)

If you do your due diligence you'll find plenty out there... you just have to look.

Just say'n.
PS. sorry for the wall of text.

[Cartman]

You are right, sometimes crafting gives even more profit. Currently the Cataclysm ores are very cheap (2-2.5 gold for Obsidium / Elementium) but by prospecting them a jewelcrafter can make more gold.
But to do this you have to level that profession which takes some time and materials.
The safest way to make gold is still do the daily gold run through Northrend. And don't forget that by doing the tournament quests and becoming crusader you can buy heirlooms which are still good for leveling until 80.