Seeing as how Skyrim has been out for almost ten years, most people who still play are not looking to spend their time on grinding. It might have been tolerable the first few times around, but a well-seasoned player probably doesn’t want to spend hours on end grinding before getting back to the good stuff. Not only that, but many fall into the trap of dropping thousands of gold into grinding these skills.
Unfortunately, if you choose not to grind up your skills, you miss out on so many different perks that make the gameplay a better experience. So here are some of the quickest ways to get those levels up to 100 to enjoy the game thereafter, while simultaneously making a profit instead of draining all your gold. Please note, you can make even more of a profit with all of these if you decide to use enchanted armor or potions to up the quality of the items that you create. This will all depend on the order that you decide to tackle these skills in.
Enchanting
Enchanting is a huge part of Skyrim, whether you’re looking to make the best armor or weapons. Unfortunately, leveling up enchanting can be very time and money consuming, since you need to have almost an endless supply of items to place enchantments on, in addition to having many soul gems. The best way to start is by activating the mage stone, which is South of Riverwood, and getting the well-rested bonus. You will want to do this before each time you enchant a bunch of items, since the bonus lasts eight hours. Next, travel to Dawnstar and walk to the hidden chest that’s located by the mine. This hidden chest is full of free weapons, armor, potions, soul gems, and more. Once you’ve picked up these items, you can strip all enchanted items of their enchantments (to learn them), and then use the soul gems you’ve picked up to enchant the rest. This process can be repeated endlessly by waiting 48 hours before talking to and trading with the Khajiit merchant just outside of Dawnstar, which will reset the chest. Selling everything you’ve enchanted and picked up from the chest is also a great way to stock up on gold. Note, you can still make a profit if you spend some of this gold on buying soul gems in addition to the ones you pick up, to enchant more items at a time.
Alchemy
Start by activating the thief stone, located South of Riverwood to get the bonus experience points when doing alchemy. In addition, rest to get the well-rested bonus so that leveling up goes faster. The well-rested bonus lasts eight hours, so you will probably want to do this before each batch of potions you create. Travel around to the farms outside of most of the major cities and collect a bunch of wheat. Next, you will need to collect creep cluster, which grows in numerous places, including the areas around the Atronach Stone and Kynesgrove. You can also plant these around your house so that they’re easier to collect. The last ingredient you will need is a giant’s toe. Obviously, you don’t want to spend hours at a time killing giants to gather alchemy ingredients. So, if you simply spend one session killing some giants, you can create some potions by combining those three ingredients and then sell them for a lot of gold. Once you do this, you can use that gold to buy giants' toes from alchemy shops instead of going out and killing the giants (unless, of course, you’re working on leveling up your combat skills at the time as well), and then still make a profit by selling all the potions you create after. You can reset the stock at the alchemy shops by saving the game, hitting the shopkeeper, and then reloading the saved data.
Smithing
Make sure to start by activating the warrior stone, located South of Riverwood, for the bonus experience points while smithing. In addition, resting to ensure you have the well-rested bonus will also make this process go faster. Rest before each time you are going to do the smithing part of this process. Next, make sure you know the transmute spell, so that you can turn iron to silver to gold. Iron ore can easily be bought in any major city, or you can mine it. But if you’ve spent the time leveling up your enchanting or alchemy through the methods above, you should have a good amount of gold to spend on iron ore, shortening the amount of time you need to spend on this process. If you have a low amount of magicka, you can simply wait one hour in between each transmute spell, and it will be fully restored for you to be able to cast it again. Once you’ve turned everything into gold ore, you simply go to any blacksmith and turn them all into gold rings, which sell for significantly more than what you’ve spent when buying the iron ore.
Source: ESO