Diablo 3 is scheduled to release in a little less than 2 weeks now. If you haven’t heard, Blizzard will be releasing its Real-Money Auction House where you can legally sell gold for a 15% transaction fee. You can have that money sent directly to your PayPal account. On this topic, there seem to be three type of people: People who know little to a lot about the game, people who know a lot about the game and expect to make real money and people who know a lot about the game and think that everything with the word “make real money” in it is a scam. I’m here to tell you that there’s absolutely no scam and there are several concrete ways to make real money after the release of Diablo 3.

#1 Getting Ready

Obviously, the biggest thing you can do is to have a clue. Any clue at all will help you be a better player. The better player you are the better chance you will have of finding lucky legendary item first or be able to capitalize on an opportunity to make money through any of the ways below. There are dozens of Diablo 3 sites, this is just one of them. There are several Diablo 3 Communities and even paid services where folks talk all day about making money in Diablo 3. Being ready will spark your interest, engage your critical thinking and help illuminate your path to success.

#2 Selling Your Gold

I’ve written at length about why you should sell your gold as soon as possible in the first month. The basic idea is that when everyone is leveling up at the same time gold is going to be a hot commodity. The price is going to start surprisingly high, maybe even as high as $0.50/1,000 gold and drop dramatically towards fractions of a penny per 1,000 gold. Every dime you spend on the first and second day is going to cost you more if you had waited to spend it on day 5. Be very mindful of where you spend your gold on in the beginning, because it may cost you more than you think. Don’t spend money training your Blacksmith who you don’t plan to use until it’s higher level. Instead, cash out on the Real-Money Auction House, save your money and buy gold back a week later.

* Blizzard recently announced that the RMAH will not go live until a week after release.

#3 Farming

While farming is not such a great way to make a living in World of Warcraft, it always becomes insanely profitable right after huge content patches and expansions. After Cataclysm released farming Obsidium ore was one of the best ways to make gold. Having extra herbs after Inscription was released before Wrath of the Lich King was another insane way to make gold. I’ve tested several ways to farm in Diablo 3 and I think that several of these methods are still going to work in the live version of the game. They may not work in late June or July, but they sure as hell will work throughout May before everyone else finds this website and takes advantage of methods I’ve already created and tested.

In Diablo 3 there won’t just be “farming” there will be gold farming, essence farming and gear farming. Each one will require a different approach and yield different gains.

#4 Using Artisans

Players have already demonstrated that you can make gold crafting with your Blacksmith in the beta. There’s no reason to expect that it won’t work in the live version of the game. If you’re not familiar with the crafting system in Diablo 3 then it’s important to understand that you dont’ craft a particular piece of gear with certain stats, instead you craft a particular piece of gear and it gets random stats. This means that you may invest in crafting 50-100 of any given piece of gear and then turn around and sell 10-20 of them on the auction house, salvage (disenchant) the results and then either reuse these trade goods or sell them back on the auction house. Using your Blacksmith, no doubt, will be an essential way to make gold once most players are level 60 and prices of trade goods start to settle.

#5 Avoid Time Sinks

A time sink, similar to a gold sink, is something that sucks your time down the drain. This can include anything from chatting to staring at your skill screen reading tooltips. Sure this stuff is fun, but you don’t have to wait until Diablo 3 is released to get some of these out of your system. I came up with a list of Diablo 3 Time Sinks which includes chatting, auction surfing, artisan loitering, devising your skill build and rerolling new characters. If you want to make real money then don’t waste time. You can spend all day at Blizzard’s skill calculator now learning about your classes skills. Otherwise you can visit my Diablo 3 Builds page to see the starter builds I have come up with.

#6 Playing the Auction House

Some people hear about making money in Diablo 3 and this is what they automatically think about. There are a lot of tricks to the auction house, including easy things like how to understand the price structure. There will also be advanced strategies like manipulating the auction house, things that I haven’t tested personally yet so I will refrain from speculating on. You should definitely understand the difference between the two auction houses and have a good grasp on the RMAH fees.

#7 Leveling

The first person to level 60 should be pretty rich. The first person to solo farm Manglemaw on Inferno mode  is going to be really rich as well. If you decide to focus on leveling then make sure you don’t waste time with time sinks like I mentioned above, don’t spend time working with or leveling your artisan. Put all your gold into low-cost gear using my finding good gear for cheap trick (not published yet). Finally, get a fricken group of friends and don’t try to go at it alone. If you didn’t play in the D3 beta then watch some videos on YouTube to get some ideas of what to expect and don’t waste time reading quests when the game goes live.

There are probably dozens of other ways to make gold later this month in Diablo 3, but hopefully these will help spark your imagination and you can come up with something unique that will work for you. This is a pretty big opportunity, we haven’t seen a mass release like this in a very long time. Back when WoW came out no one was ready to capitalize on the game and there wasn’t a legal way to sell gold. If you want to stay on the cutting edge of Diablo 3 gold making, join Diablo 3 Artisans (free) and get daily updates of what’s working best for players and what we can do to prepare for the upcoming release. You can also look at old posts or search the page to find all sorts of great free content.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.