If you sell gold to places like IGE there isn't alot of chance to actually get banned.

If you invest time as said is 7 days play time even at minimum wage (160 hours or so for 70) is over 1000$ worth
If you make 300 gold per hour and sell it to a wholesaler for 1/2 the worth you are making about 9$ an hour... lets assume you get 1k gold in 3 hours and you sell it to a wholesaler for 1/2 the value (normally 45$) thats 25$ for your 3 hours of work so that is only about 7$ an hour.

If you were to level the characters, get them gear and epic flyers and such... it StILL wouldn't be worth it because you could only sell each for like 500$ cause most people dont spend a grand on characters anymore. So you are looking at a maximum of 2500 for the job and it takes over 250 hours to get everything you need for a successful sale.

There is no money in WoW anymore.

The only way to make money is to get a 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 team to 2k+ rating and maintain it while selling 10 game sessions for 1k gold on each. If you do this you can make approximately 10k gold per day as part time work. This means you get 200$ for 1 day's part time work (5-6 hours) that is over 40$ an hour.

If you do this with say 3 people you can make 5x of each team and make huge amounts of profit... but the time it takes to get to the point where you can sell points is retarded....

You'd have to make your own WoW website and sell gold for a single server for cheap... and then blizzard would just ban the administrator's ip address and such from their servers and eventually figure out what characters are the farmers and such and in the long run it turns into a wasted 500+ hours.

The ONLY way to make money is to cheat and dupe items. If you can't do that don't bother trying (my friend dax does this, can make over 100k gold a day on every server both horde and alliance) He's made litterly millions selling gold... but he's an exception. He also is in jail right now for fraud against the government and wont get out for another 6 months or so.

You either play WoW cause ur addicted, wanna be the best, spend time with irl friends, or wanna make money. The last one doesn't happen too often... and if it does ur getting minimum wage when you could actually have a social life with a real job.