Pros and Cons of Building and Flipping Websites as a Profession

I’ve been building niche and authority website for over 5 years now and I think I understand the pros and cons that this type of business brings.

For me personally the advantages surely outweigh the cons. But is it perfect for everyone? Definitely not.

In this post I want to dive into this profession so you could better understand if this is something you want to get into.

Work from home or coffee shop and avoid commuting

First thing I like is that I’m location independent and I don’t have a fixed working schedule. You can travel and work, schedule a big part of your work in advance, take mini vacations, switch between intensive and light work and still receive affiliate and advertising profits.

You don’t have to deal with clients

Second big plus for me is basically having no clients. I just log into few dashboards and check the earnings. Or send an invoice to an advertising client.

Not having to comply to customer demands and talk to clients is definitely in line with my introvert nature. I used to work as a tech support agent so I know it quite well how mentally exhausting can it be to deal with people.

Outsource and scale

Most of the work that you would be doing can be systematized and outsourced. You can find quality content writers, virtual assistants, link builders and free up your time. Then you can scale your business or use that extra free time for your hobbies or passion projects.

This all sounds good but it took me some time to break free from the corporate world and there were some ups and downs along the road. Lets see the downsides of building and flipping websites.

It can be a very slow process

If you’re building websites from scratch, months if not years could pass until you reach a point of replacing your day job income with website profits.

Earnings can be unstable

Things are evolving quite fast in the digital world. One year you might be driving a lot of traffic from google, then they change their algorithm and you loose 50% of your traffic overnight.

Maybe you took some risks (like using a PBN or buying backlinks) and got caught and penalized. Maybe your competition beat you. Or maybe you were just unlucky. No algorithm is perfect.

Same drastic changes can also happen with other traffic sources, like Pinterest or Facebook.

That’s why it’s good to diversify your traffic and income sources, keep on top of all the changes, and be prepare for the worst.

Who would I suggest to get into this career?

I would recommend you to start building websites if you:

  • have the motivation, some extra time (at least 7 hours a week) and a bit of money (at least $100 to cover the hosting and domain name)
  • have the motivation, very little extra time (at least 3 hours per week) but more money to invest
  • would like to build properties which would generate income even when you don’t actively work on them (I avoid the term “passive income” on purpose)
  • don’t expect an overnight success
Who would I not suggest to pick this career:
  • people who need to start making money straight away
  • people who don’t have any interest in this and/or no extra time to dedicate to this
  • people who don’t have the patience to grow their project and wait for months for first earnings (don’t expect much happening in the first 6 months if you’re growing a website from scratch)
  • people who don’t understand technology and have no patience to learn basic things like installing wordpress and appropriate plugins