Grinding for gold is the most basic and most common form of gold farming. Since this is the most basic form of gold farming it does get a lot of attention from all sorts of players. However most players never end of grinding out the amount of gold they should. It's very easy to farm up to 250g/hour now with the Burning Crusade. The mobs drop a lot more coins, the items that drop vendor for a higher price.

On top of this you will be getting greens, blues and epics that will be selling for an even larger price then before. You can sell your items for a lot more gold because the average coin drop rate itself has been increased. This means there are a lot more players out there with money to throw around.

Knowing the correct places to farm and know how to farm are key assets when it comes to playing World of Warcraft effectively. Many players make minor mistakes when it comes to farming that puts them far behind the rest of the competition.

Downtime is one of the most major mistakes players make when grinding gold. Downtime is the amount of time during grinding that you spend NOT killing other mobs. This includes running to the next mob, sitting for a drink, chatting to your friends, not chain-casting your next spell (casting the spell as soon as it's available) all of these things will drop your gold per hour rate. The most common downtime is sitting down to eat or drink. Every glass has a favorable "Grinding spec" and if you plan to farm for gold for a certain amount of time, it's well worth the money to re-spec to.

Every time you take a seat to drink or eat, you are knocking anywhere between 15-30 seconds off of your killing time. Let's say you can kill 5 mobs in a row without having to sit and drink or eat. That means, every time you kill 100 mobs you are spending 10 minutes on your butt. That's a pretty large amount of time, and most classes can't even make it 5 mobs with some of the specs.

For instance, my Mage was Fire Spec for a while until I realized I was only getting about 3 kills on average before I had to take a drink. I switched to frost, which is a premiere grinding spec and it got me up to 8 kills before I sat down. This is a great rate because I nearly cut my downtime to 2/3rd of the rate it was.

So next time you go out grinding, remember that downtime is a key penalty to the gold rate you pull in. You can easily double your gold rate over night by choosing the right spec for your character.