Are there any way to make currency strictly from buying and crafting items?

So I dropped a staff that looked pretty okay, t1 spell dmg, t3 extra cold/fire, t2 cast speed and some other crap suffix. Trying to learn more about crafting and decided to see if I could make it useful, so I bought a perfect essence of sorcery and used the omen that removes a suffix when using a perfect essence for a 50/50 of removing the crap suffix, which it did. So now I have a staff with +5 all spell skills plus the other good mods and I'm thinking I can desecrate it now with an omen of abyssal echoes to try and hit some other useable suffix and then make a new build with it. It got me wondering though if people are scouring trade for items that are decent but not great and crafting those items up to flip them for a lot of divs, I think this staff has to now be worth a decent amount by looking at the trade site. If there are people who do this, how do you identify the items that you want to finish crafting?