Having leveled herbalism to 375, I can tell you it can be VERY profitable if you stick with it for the long haul. It made me enough gold in 3 days to buy my epic mount. Many of the high end herbs from the outlands will sell for 1-2g each. Ghost Mushrooms are still a huge seller as they are used by an Alch to make Elixir of Shadow Power. Warlocks need to turn in 10 Elixers as part of there
Dreadsteed epic mount quest line at 60.
It's been said several times but I will iterate, 2 gathering professions will make you more money than a gather/crafting profession. Crafting professions; Tailoring, Leather Working, Jewelry Crafting, Engineering, Blacksmithing and Enchanting* require you to use a significant amount of the materials you've gathered to level the profession without really being able to sell the end product for any sort of profit, most times you will wind up selling to a vendor for next to nothing or giving it to a low level guildie. Selling the raw materials, cloth, ore, leathers, shards/dusts, stones will get you gold faster. That being said, sticking with a crafting profession or switching to one later on when you have a ton of gold will give you the ability to make some great items for sale and especially for yourself. Many of the BoP items that you can make for yourself as a Tailor/LW/JC/Eng/BS/Enchanter are really great. Just make sure your profession fits with your class. If your a priest don't take up blacksmithing, you won't be able to use anything you make.
As you are level 30, keep the herbalism and pick up another gathering profession, skinning or mining. I would lean torwards skinning. As others have said, you can't have both the herb and mining trackers on at the same time. One way to help get around this is to use the Cartographer mod. There are Herb and Mining plugings that will keep track of where you picked herbs and mined nodes. These locations will be marked on the mini and full size map the next time you are in that region. After some time you will begin to see patterns of where the nodes/herbs appear making gathering life a little earier.
To see how well stuff sells and for how much get the
Auctioneer mod and scan AH 1-2 times a day for about a week to get a nice baseline. You can also search
Wowecon's website for items. I've found it to be fairly accurate but once Auctioneer is setup and loaded with data it is the most accurate.
- Azoth