In the present invention, a method of producing stable bare colloidal gold nanoparticles is disclosed. The nanoparticles can subsequently be subjected to partial or full surface modification. The method comprises preparation of colloidal gold nanoparticles in a liquid by employing a top-down nanofabrication method using bulk gold as a source material. The surface modification of these nanoparticles is carried out by adding one or multiple types of ligands each containing functional groups which exhibit affinity for gold nanoparticle surfaces to produce the conjugates. Because of the high efficiency and excellent stability of the nanoparticles produced by this method, the fabricated gold nanoparticle conjugates can have surface coverage with functional ligands which can be tuned to be any percent value between 0 and 100%.