I’m still in the process of getting back in touch with “the digital world” since coming back from my mission, I think, because I was mostly oblivious to how huge blogs have become over the past few years. Regardless, I was reading one such blog and came upon an article describing how, much like one can “flip” houses in the real estate industry, one can similarly flip websites for a profit. I must say that this idea really makes my entrepreneur sense tingle like crazy! The real question is, if you execute such transactions successfully, are they truly profitable in an economic sense? What I mean is that, like house-flipping, one must be either extremely adept at web development themselves, or they must be willing to contract out those services to another; both require man hours. I wonder how good a developer one needs to be in order to obtain a good ROI with site-flipping, taking into consideration the hours you put into it and how much money you could have made in another sector with those hours of labor. My guess is that a seasoned siteflipper would be skillful at assessing websites prior to purchasing them, performing “due dilligence” if you will, and would be able to, based on his assessment, determine how many hours would be needed to optimize the site.
Now let’s take this a step further, if someone is that skilled at web development, site assessment, and SEO, how much could they make per hour as a consultant? Economically speaking, it is rational to siteflip only if the profits from those hours spent “optimizing” a site are greater than the profits you would gain from consulting, ceteris paribus.
Considering that, in my experience, SEO consultants make ridiculous bank, it would take a true steal of a deal to draw one away from their consulting practice for long enough to actually flip a site.