Making a killing in the WoW auction house

I've been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit lately, and I thought I'd share a little about my recent experience on the auction house. I just leveled a new character and funded much of its gear with money from my main, so I was feeling a little poor all around. The alt had taken Inscription and Enchanting as professions, and I decided to see how they fared in terms of profitability... Wow.

Inscription allows the character to turn herbs into specialty pigments and inks, and then further convert the inks into glyphs. Two key points set it apart from other professions:

First, glyphs transcend character levels. A level 80 Paladin may desire many of the same glyphs as a level 20 Paladin would. This means that nearly every glyph that a scribe learns throughout leveling his profession is a valuable commodity.

Second, every glyph in the game can be normalized to the same underlying cost to produce. This is thanks to the fact that a trader in the high-level city of Dalaran will gladly trade you any ink in the game for your Ink of the Sea, the ink produced by the highest level of herbs currently in the game.

With these two factors in mind, I was able to produce a modest set of 100 glyphs to list on the auction house as an experiment. The accepted markup on glyphs is astounding! My cost to produce and sell a glyph is 3 gold plus about 5 seconds worth of time crafting and listing the item. I have been selling glyphs on the auction house for anywhere from 10-30 gold. That's up to 1000% return on my investment.

With the glyph business and a few side projects (dipping a toe into enchanting and Darkmoon Card sales), my net income is in the 1000s of gold every week -- for context, this character leveled decadently over the course of two months with less than a 10,000 gold stipend from my main character, an amount I'm confident I can soon produce weekly after some more refinement of my business.