WoW newbie looking for advice

[NiteFox]

I now adopt two gathering professions when I start a new character for a rapid influx of gold, which I can use to buy bags and skills. However, when I first started playing, I would always pick a production profession with its associated gathering profession. It's just so cool to be able to make your own stuff.

In going with Sheep's comment here, if you're interested in working towards maintaining several alts you can maintain a fairly decent support network among your characters with regards to tradeskills. For instance, my main is a Hunter, and took Skinning and Leatherworking right from the off, and hasn't changed at all. Now, while he is struggling to scrape together enough high-level leather to make stuff that he can use, he still has a plethora of lower-level Leatherworking patterns which don't earn him any skillups...

...but are useful for my second character, a Druid with Herbalism and Alchemy. A few minutes one-shotting lower-level monsters for the relevant leather, and I've got enough materials for a pair of Hillman's Shoulders fit for a moodruid. While she is too low a level to cook up any decent potions in return for my main, she can brew up a stack of pots to help any new characters I create, and it's not like she's actually going to use all those Rage Potions as a Balance Druid herself, but my Warrior will.

Remember that you can mail stuff between your characters with abandon. I haven't actually played my main account since the new mailing options introduced with 2.3, but it really wasn't that much of an issue to send individual letters with a piece of leather armour, and any herbs or alchemy fish, to my Druid from my main.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you, getting your first character up to 70 will be a lot harder than working on alts, but once you've made it, your other characters will have a lot easier time of it. Not only are you smarter with how the game works, but you do have the single-entity support network that is your main. If you're savvy, your main will save up any bags they've grown out of, and with access to Outland they'll be able to snap up huge Bind on Equip tradeskill bags (Which are large packs, but can only hold items relevant to a particular tradeskill - For instance, a Leatherworking bag can hold leathers, hides, and a skinning knife, while a Mining bag will hold ores, refined ingots, stones, and a pick). Pick up one of those, and it makes the early levelling of tradeskills a lot easier to deal with.

One other tip I can give you is to dedicate one character on your chosen server to be a mule character. I don't know how Guild Banks have affected the potency of a single-player mule (As opposed to the guildwide shared mules that the banks are supposed to replace.) but a mule for your own use helps immensely on three accounts:

1) The first is that it acts as an overflow for items that might come in useful later, either for your main character or anything else that follows. When I mentioned above that your main should keep all their bags, I didn't mean actually keep them on themselves in their bank - Ship all your old bags and non-soulbound seconds to your mule, and when another character grows into them, ship them over.
2) Easy auction house access: Found a neat little BoE green (Or blue if you're in Outland) that can make a tidy packet on the auction house, but you're in the middle of nowhere? Rather than spend all that time getting off track, heading back to a capital city when you could be out in the Badlands collecting ten buzzard asses for the next quest, head to the mailbox, ship it over to your mule, and carry on questing. Next chance you get, hop on to your mule, get all the items that your other characters found while doing real work, and put them all up for sale in the AH. It's no problem whatsoever to get a mule from any starting point to the nearest capital city.
3) Avoiding temptation: If you're saving up for something expensive, ship any excess gold to your mule for safekeeping, only keeping enough for yourself to keep up with repair bills and any crucial reagents your class may need. The thing about having a small stack of gold on yourself at any time means you might be tempted to hit up the auction house and blowing it all on junk. We've all been there, I'm sure. By putting the cash into the safety of another character, you're less likely to spend it on other stuff.