Grinding for money in World of Warcraft can be a real pain in the butt, especially when it's large amounts of money you need to secure in order to get the next level of spells, new equipment, or your epic mount.

Sure, grinding for money may take a long time, but with these techniques you can significantly speed up the process.

Learn a gathering trade - Whether it's mining, herbalism, or skinning, gathering trades are the foundation of every other profession out there, and this means your products will always be in demand, even if the hot items in the other trades may change from week to week.

The secret to any gathering trade is to do it consistently so your skills increase as you play the game. It can be very frustrating when, at level 40, you discover that skinning brings in much more gold than alchemy, but your skinning skill is at level 5.

One of the best ways to grind money in Warcraft is to skin every skinnable beast you come across (or kill yourself). Pigs, sheep, wolves, dragons - they're all skinnable, and their skins (usually leather, hides, wool, or scales) can bring in decent amounts of gold in large stacks.

Treasure hunting is like free money - Everyone should treasure hunt, but they don't. There are treasure chests hidden throughout the World of Warcraft: you need to keep an eye out for them and remember their locations. While you're out grinding for gold remember these treasure chests and open them at every opportunity. While the items may not be useful, they can be sold for decent profit, and most treasure chests contain rare items which can be auctioned off for a decent amount of gold.

The auction house can be manipulated - If you keep a sharp eye on the WoW auction house, you'll notice that it behaves almost like the stock market (prices go up and down). If you're really sharp you'll be able to spot real deals and pick up expensive items cheaply, then sell them for a good profit - just don't forget to take the auction houses percentage cut into account or you may end up losing money.

Sell everything, drop nothing - A lot of impatient players will simply drop items so they can continue grinding, and this is a really bad idea. If you're grinding away and notice that you're low on space, or out of space, don't drop your items. Instead, head to the nearest merchant and offload your goods, then come back and grind away some more; but, hang on to the more expensive goods do you can auction them off later.

Cut out downtime - One of the biggest problems with grinding is the downtime, because you're eventually going to run low on health (or mana) and need to rest for a while. If you're at a high level you know how long it can take to rest up to full. There are a couple of ways you can cut down on downtime:

• Bring food and water, or if you're a mage make sure you conjure some up for the entire party.
• If you're confident in your abilities, and you know you can get away with only having half of your health (or mana) then go for it; there's no reason to rest if you're not in danger of getting killed.

Do an instance - The best way to get gold and loot is to attack one of Warcraft's many dungeons. Yes, they're difficult, and yes you'll need a well balanced party to get through them, but the rewards are worth it ad you'll get better loot to sell, and enemies will generally drop more gold.

When it's all said and done, money grinding in WoW is all about optimizing your opportunities to get items which you will, in turn, sell.

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