This post has been migrated and imported into different systems over the years, I have not had a chance to format this post manually so it may be hard to read but I have left it here as a reference.

I have been thinking about what I really want to do lately and I am not fully sure. At first I thought it was web design which I feel that I am pretty good at and I have had many clients who loved my work both when I worked as a freelancer and from what I have done and still do through Markspixel.com. At the moment I am leaning more towards programming which I am learning more and more about through my school. Before I went to MDH I already knew some PHP but now that I am taking the Computer Science in Software Development courses I am learning more and more about PHP, C#, Objective C and other languages.

But do I want to program for clients, do I want to program my own scripts and sell them, or do I want to work and program for a company at regular hours?

My dream would probably to do neither, but it’s hard to explain why, however I would probably enjoy doing either of the three. Programming for clients would be an interesting experience but very similar to what I have already done with web design and I don’t see it being exciting and demanding enough in the long term. The second choice is what I am sort of doing with Markspixel.com but I am complimenting the scripts I sell with some affiliate scripts from other sites/programmers that I feel are at a good quality. This would not be bad at all but I am not sure I have the time at the moment and I am afraid I would run out of ideas or maybe start to find it boring. The third choice is of course working, why can’t I just get a job? Well first of all I have school to deal with which limits the amount of hours I can work. I also don’t like having a fixed set of hours when I have to work, I enjoy the luxury of being able to work until 6 am and then get up at 1pm if I want to and sometimes that works well for me. However if I was not in school and I found a job which was demanding and challenging where I could see myself learning more I would definitely deal with the 9 to 5 hours and get started. A job which requires me to do the same programming or design tasks over and over again is not something I am looking for.

One thing I actually enjoy is developing something someone needs, showing it to them, and getting feedback (especially when it’s mostly good). This goes into developing my own scripts, which I do as a hobby at the moment. Me and some friends have FIFA (soccer) tournaments on the PS3 where we have to keep track of scores, points, and rankings for every person/team. This used to be done on paper but I thought, why can’t this be done with a simple PHP program? So I spent about 8 hours putting some code together and got a basic script with no real design working and tested it out last night during a tournament. The results were pretty good, although it had some bugs during the game creation. Everyone seemed to enjoy the automatic rankings that showed who was currently in what place throughout the tournament, something that is a bit harder to do on paper every time someone plays a game. During the process I also added a goals to goals against ratio used for rankings which was also fun to see. Number of completed games was another feature I quickly implemented which was useful. All in all I believe my script handled about 56 games with very few bugs which I would call a success. Many of the people playing gave me some great feedback and new ideas on additional features to implement. I will continue working on the script in my spare time and hopefully I could launch a website so others can use it.

Which get’s me to the title of this post, affiliate marketing, maybe this is something I should get into more? I have a CJ.com account that is deactiveted for inactivity and I was considering activating it tomorrow when there support is back online. My success with SEO of billigaapan.se (my swedish company) may be a sign that I should simply make a store of affiliate products and promote it. I believe that I could make it work and it really doesn’t require much of my time when I have to focus on school and such. The products are always there and if I want to earn more money all I have to do is build some links by blog posting or maybe forums. Since Markspixel.com is magento based it could host any additional sites I may need for selling affiliate products.

Now all I need to do is find my niche, we will see how this goes :)

EDIT: Maybe commission junction has decided not to answer their phones.