Ever since I’ve come back from holiday I’ve had one regret and that is that I can’t attend this years a4uexpo London 2007, where it appears every familiar icon I know on the A4Uforum is going.

At the beginning of the year I was only an active participant on the forum but in the first half of this year I went on the affiliate cruise to Amsterdam and met up and had a good drink with many of those little icons for the first time.

Then Nadeem Azam organised an event in Leeds in July, where I met more little icons including Elaine, Dave and family and we had a good chat with mysterious Stu Foster.

I get 35 days holiday a year but they gradually started diminishing. Just as I promised a mate I’d go to Portugal, I got invited to Ibiza, so jetted off from one to the other.

Then I found my sister, was treating my mum to a two week holiday in Hong Kong and I thought as I had two weeks holiday still to take I may as well take good advantage. I’d last visited 9 years ago, so I was long overdue a visit.

This meant I have only 3 days holiday to take and it is my ritual to always take Christmas week off, so that I am not travelling between Leeds and my parents home of Middlesbrough. It’s my birthday Boxing Day and so work on the 27th would be a physical impossibility.

So, technically I had no spare days for the a4uexpo or any Christmas parties I’d get invited to.

There was also the cost. As well as the pass that is almost the price of a football season ticket, there’s the expensive hotels, train fare, potential new shirts to buy, hire of black tie for the awards? and of course money for the drink.

I know you’ve seen my previous post by now and so anything above £200 makes a dent, especially after a holiday.

But still I want to see more of those little icons.

So, when I saw that there were a few freebie passes knocking about in various competitions I thought I’d give them a little whirl.

I made a very late entry on Kieron’s blog but Laura ticked all the right boxes.

Then there was the poster competition. Well, I have to admit I did waste an hour of time trying to think of creative ideas when it looked like there wasn’t going to be a single entry and I may win on default but I thought that the Friday announcement for a winner was leaving it too late for me anyway. I am technically supposed to give 10 days notice for booking time off work.

There was also some free passes from Buy.at. All you have to do is send them a mail and you may be picked from a hat.

So that’s where I am today. I’ve sent them an email.

If my name is drawn, it will be more panic than excitement but it means I’ll get to see more icons.

People make New Years resolutions for fun. I’ve stuck to mine when it was clear I had no other choice. It was 6:30pm on New Years Eve 2006 and I logged onto my bank online to see how much I could spend at the New Years Eve party at the Middlesbrough working mans club, with my friends and family.

I got a shock. It told me that I was over my over-draft limit and so I had no cash available. The worrying thing was that my next pay cheque wouldn’t arrive until the end of January and I still had rent and other bills to pay well before then.

Fortunately my Shop Codes site reported excellent traffic and sales from October and so my business bank account had a few thousand sat in it. I transferred some money over as emergency cover and then set about to rebuild my finances.

On the 4th January I sent myself an email detailing the debt I was in that included one overdraft, one loan and six credit cards. I wasn’t concerned about the loan but it was the credit cards. One card alone raised its interest rate from 9% to 16% and the other banks were soon to follow.

Each month I was paying a significant amount of money just paying off the interest and so my debt wasn’t getting cleared. In fact I was spending so much meeting minimum repayments that I had to keep using the credit cards to shop for essentials.

As my business had been regularly bringing in good revenue for a few months I gambled that my bank would give me a big loan to cover all my outstanding debts, including a £9,000 debt to themselves.

So I applied for a £25,000 loan during January online rather than seeing someone at the bank face-to-face. If I failed the application I’d have to get in touch with a debt management agency. As it was, I got an instant approval and the money was soon in my account.

It would be repaid over 3 years. My repayment would be less than the minimum payments I was paying towards my credit cards. And it would cost over £2,500. So I was effectively £27,000 in debt at the start of this year.

Instantly I paid off all my credit cards and attempted to close four. That wasn’t without complication. So I still have a few unused with credit balances.

I then closed all my online accounts where I could pay for anything with a previous credit card, such as gambling, book clubs or magazine subscriptions.

I am now only 26 months away from being debt free. That sounds a lot but it would have been 260 months minimum in the previous situation.

The picture is also far more rosier. I don’t actually struggle any month now and get by on my day job monthly pay. I’ve also had three fantastic holidays this year including back-to-back holidays to Portugal and Ibiza and a two-week stay in Hong Kong.

I’ve only had to use a credit card once in the whole of this year and that was to fund my Middlesbrough season ticket at £400.

A milestone came for me in September when I realised just how far I’d turned the corner. For the first time ever my total amount of money sat in my bank accounts covered all of my debts and more. So I was above water albeit that some would be paid to the tax man at some point.

Plus, with the news that Google are sending me a cheque for £17,000 in the coming weeks, my business bank account will soon have well over £50,000 sat there until the next tax bill is due.

£50,000 is a milestone that I’ll be quietly celebrating with cash up front, with my friends at the working mans club.

I’ve added a ‘Top 20 Incentives’ chart to my Shop Codes home page that rewards merchants that have either sent me a free gift or are currently offering an incentive promotion to drive more sales.

For those merchants that have sent me a gift in recent days and months, this is my way of saying thankyou. I’m hoping it will also encourage other merchants to send things to my postal address.

My most recent gift received was a bottle of champagne from The Sunday Times Wine Club for “generating the highest sales increase” in the last week of September.

I was also one of ‘top ten affiliates in September’ for PhysioRoom.com and so they’re sending me the PC game ‘Football Manager 2007′.

Getting Personal are sending me a personalised 2008 calendar so that I can see the quality. I’ve opted for ‘The Apprentice’ one and look forward to displaying it.

The section is also of benefit to the customer as behind every link is a discount code or promotion of some kind. So I feel the small section is of benefit to the customer, merchant and myself.

It is a Top 20 chart and it will be filled with the merchants offering the best affiliate incentives and those sending me gifts. The customer doesn’t have to know any different as their ‘Incentives’ are the discounts available.

X Factor judge Dannii Minogue is inadvertently helping Befuddle become a rising star again. Google is still giving Befuddle the big X exactly one month after labelling it as a ‘malware site‘.

However hot Dannii is top of the searches and a search for ‘dannii minogue’ in Google is returning the new look Befuddle as the fifth result on page one. This is resulting in rising visitors (ahem), page views and advertising revenue.

Befuddle is now making more revenue than before. Gone are the adverts from Claxon Media and alongside the larger size images, are Google Adsense adverts at the top and bottom of the pages. It is here that the financial transformation looks interesting. Since AdSense was introduced to Befuddle after the 10th September it made $66 last month. Already it has made $55 in the first 10 days of October.

All the hundreds of old celebrity pages were ruthlessly removed from the site and a selection of new ones added for Britney Spears, Dannii Minogue, Denise van Outen, Emma Jones, Gemma Atkinson, Jessica Simpson, Jordan and Sarah Harding.

Dannii Minogue is on the nations television screens every week and it’s no surprise to see that there’s hot search activity for her.

Befuddle is currently receiving 900 unique visitors each day despite only promoting 8 celebrities at this time. The Dannii Minogue section of pages were viewed over 4,500 times yesterday. This resulted in $17 of Adsense revenue.

When the malware problem was raised, Google traffic dropped from 950 unique visitors to 80 overnight. It has now climbed to a steady 250 each day

Pageviews were at 12,000 a day then dropped to a low of 2,500. Now they’re at a healthy 6,500 page views a day.

So today Befuddle is making £8.50 a day and this is despite it only having 8 pages of celebrities. I’ve hundreds of pictures and pages ready to upload from my home pc, so I’ll be watching the traffic and new revenue stream with interest.

I’m planning to spend my time on my much more profitable discount code site but I know I could make more Befuddle visitors a little bit happier too.