Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
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Posted - 2008.05.01 09:02:00 -
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In EVE, pretty much everything revolves around your ability to gather, multiply, save or use ISK effectively.
Anything you want done in EVE, if you have enough ISK, and you know how to get it, you can get it... characters, ships, goods, mercenaries and so on, you name it, ISK gets it for you.
Bottom line, you earn ISK by hard work (or not so hard work, depends on your talent, your time online, or for some, their real-life wallet size), so you can then go ahead and blow it all up somehow... of course, you can just look at it if you so prefer, but that's not that much fun.
So, if you want to go the "honest" way (that is, make ISK the way you're supposed to, not buy it from somebody else), you might want to read this thread here that I wrote a long time ago describing the way things work in EVE, and how all interact with eachother.
Bottom line, just about anything you can do that requires effort can result in ISK if you do it smart enough.
The easiest ways for the beginner are running missions (be it combat missions or courier missions), mining (relatively low risk, but also boring and not particularly well-paying for a beginner), manufacture (you can never go wrong with ammo manufacture in mission hubs, even with low skills and unresearched blueprints) or last but not least, a combination between hauling and trading (some prefer almost exclusively hauling from area to area, others prefer trading in a single hub with no hauling at all).
As you get more skilled and your wealth increases, you can specialize in either of the above for some decent income.
L4 mission running with a ship capable of finishing them fast (and/or safe) can be a very steady source of income. Not only that, but the standings you get from completing missions help a lot in other ways, so it's ALWAYS a good idea to run some missions... if you're interested in the standings mainly, then L3 missions might be a better way to go (easier to complete fast, standings gains are decent, and storyline gains per time spent are actually higher than L4s).
Mining in a Covetor or a Hulk might not be so profitable as mission-running, but you can get "there" faster, and the amount of effort required is significantly smaller (a bit risky if you're operating in suicide-gank territory, but otherwise pretty safe).
You can combine your mining career with a manufacturer career (even if you can do either one just fine separately), or even with a combination of hauling/trading (again, you can still do those separately just fine).
Of course, if you sell your products for the same price as you could sell the minerals you manufactured them from, there's no point in manufacturing at all (a mistake you'd be surprised how many people are making)... the only even remotely acceptable excuse here (for those selling below mineral value) is in case you just can't sell the minerals at all (very unlikely, but you never know) yet the end-product sells very fast (doubt that too, if it would sell fast it would have a better price to begin with).
Of course, you could also go the scientist route (T2 invention/manufacture), but for that you'd better have the standings.
First off, with the proper skills and standings, you can get datacores from research projects, which you can either just sell for a quick buck, or try to use in invention, then manufacture and sell the goods.
Same caveat here, if you can sell the intermediate product for more than the end product, don't bother going on... it's the main reason why profit margings are always low, people confusing income with profit and being unable to separate the stages of a product if they do them all themselves.
Well, that's the basic idea, I could go on and on and on about ways to make ISK, but I think you got the gist of it 
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