I am usually very skeptical when it comes to make money online programs. However, when my friend Garry Conn mentioned about it in his blog and after talking to him on IM, I have decided to give this a go.

PepperJamNetwork is a affiliate marketing network that has just launched but brings a lot of experience to the table being a affiliate marketer themselves. Having meddled with just Google Adsense so far, I am excited at this new platform of monetization here and elsewhere in my other blogs. PepperJam has a nice and trendy interface going for them and have a nice array of various advertisers already in their network that I can see fit this blog.

If you are a newbie to the affiliate marketing network arena, PepperJam has a nice FAQ section that answers a lot of questions in detail. Plus, the PepperJam accoutn comes with a chat facility and a knowledge vault that helps in this area as well.

This could be another one of those programs that comes out with nothingto show for, but I wouldn’t know that and I don’t want miss out on getting in early.

I don’t like to pepper my posts with referral links and I am transparent about things I do here. If you are interested in joining PepperJam, you could be nice to me and use the referral link below to sign up for it. Yes, they offer $5 for every sign up you refer so don’t forget to blog about it after you sign up. I hate to sound like a make money commercial, hey if it’ll pay for a nice dinner once in a while, why not give it a shot right?

Web 2.0 technology. Pepperjam Network. Sign Up Today!

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Thanks to all those who stopped by to wish me on my birthday. I have spent the last year learning, growing and having a lot of fun in the blogging world. Here are some great posts that I came across since my last roundup.

• Booking a hotel, the ProBargainHunter way - ProBargainHunter
  One of my favorite bargain sites shares ideas and tips when you are booking a hotel through sites such as Priceline, Hotwire, etc.
• 8 Characteristics of a Well Designed About Page - Tish of BloggingGal
  I have long neglected my about page and Tish has given me the motivation to sit down and re-work it. Check out her convincing reasons to see why you should do it too. Also, check out her monthly contest where she gives away a cool 125×125 ad space to one winner who subscribes to her RSS feed. She is giving away an ad space to read such quality content! No kidding.. just add the feed already!
• Check Pagerank of all Internal Pages on your Site - Fahad of Technodorm
  Fahad is sharing how you can see Google PR for links in your site live in a visual way. It even shows the nofollow links with a red cross. Check out this post on other options of doing this as well.
• Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away! - Stephen of More Than Scratch the Surface
  I really enjoy reading Stephen’s well thought-out, incisive, to-the-point writing style. This time he is writing about the merits of CommentLuv WordPress plugin and how you could take advantage of it. Also, take note of the section where he mentiones how Feedburner url redirection could be hurting your Google juice in this context. Excellent post, Stephen!
• Passive Income, or How To Make Money Without Trying - RT of Untwisted Vortex
  I started blogging with monetizing my blog at the farthest corner of my mind but it has become a reality in a year. So, if you haven’t yet considered it atleast read this excellent post by RT and see if you are sitting on a gold mine. I am far from making a bunch but in the last couple of months I have made enough to more than cover the costs of hosting. My next goal is to see if it can cover maybe the cost of a nice dinner and a movie every month.
• Download BitTorrent Files Without A Client - My post at TechieBuzz
  BitTorrent is a great way to share and get files for legitimate reasons even though most often it is usually identified with illegal file sharing. Find out how you can download files ia BitTorrent from a browser without a bittorrent client. Also, check out Keith’s post on a call for help. Silki an author at TechieBuzz just like me, could use some for her brother who is ill.

Also, check Kontera’s Video contest where you could win some cool cash prizes ($500, $200 & $100). Thanks Matthew of Blog About Your Blog for the heads up.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s round up. Hope you found a couple of new blogs to add to your feed reader as well.

I have been working on this theme mod for a bit and it is almost a whole month late in making its way here. I meant to release it for the New Year’s day but my day job kept me busy to complete the stuff I wanted done. So, instead here it is for your eyes today. If you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click through to check out the design effort.

Why modify instead of a new theme?

You might be thinking why I took the trouble of clobbering an excellent theme. I will have to take you back to the reason I started blogging in the first place. It was my interest in learning web development and I did not imagine I would try to make money off of it when I registered ShanKri-la (Sep 20, 2006). What better way than to get your own domain name and run a live website? After a few months of fiddling with cPanel & learning HTML & CSS, finally installed WordPress and started blogging towards the end of Feb 2007.

I am still learning various aspects of web development and have become quite adept at helping others with their WordPress theme customization. I loved the current theme I was using but wanted ShanKri-la to have it’s unique look. So, here we go with my custom modification of the Saur theme.

I have to mention a very helpful WordPress plugin that let me work on this new design while you were still looking at the old one.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin lets you chose a theme - in my case I made a copy of current theme to a new folder - and after activating the new theme in the plugin menu, you will see the new theme while you are logged in as Admin. Everyone else will continue to see the old theme.

Direct Advertising in ShanKri-la

I have finally opened up direct advertising in ShanKri-la. This was another reason for making the theme mod so I can implement the ad scheme the way I wanted to. A lot of themes seem to put more focus in that than usability and I wanted to strike a good balance for my readers. I would love to hear what you think about it.

Also, you won’t see Google Adsense ads anymore if you are a regular reader here or if you come directly from someone else’s site. I have made it so the ads are visible only to the search engine visitors as they are more likely to click on ads anyways and it would make it pleasant reading for my readers.

For those interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, you can get details of various advertising options from the ‘Adevrtise’ page.

Areas of Improvement

If you have a keen eye, you would probably notice all the changes but I am going to list them here quickly if anyone is interested in things of that sort.

Header area

Just some minor tweaks with the search bar gone from here to make way for a premium 468×60 ad space.

Content & Comment Area

Not any major change except the Adsense ads won’t appear for my regular readers (tell me if you miss it ) plus I have removed other ad programs that weren’t performing well.

Sidebar

This is where the big changes are done. I am a strong believer in using tags and tag clouds for easy navigation. Hence the prominent area for the tag cloud. I think the dark colored block stands out highlingting the tags, subscription options & the search field.

Also, added the 125×125 ad area for direct advertisements here.

Footer

Footer is another area I have modified a lot by moving some of the clutter from the sidebar to the footer so I can free up the sidebar space for more relevant things. Plus, the slow loading widgets such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc won’t be a concern anymore as they will be loading after everything else in the page loads up. One major advantage to this is that the sidebar now can show more and longer comments hopefully helping everyone to see the conversation going here.

I am going to concentrate next on improving the load time of the blog as well. I would love to hear any suggestions or your experience in tackling the load time problems.

After all, I have done all this to in an effort to make ShanKri-la a better reading experience for you and would love to hear how you perceive this change.

I don’t have much of personal info in the About page and figured this might be a good time to share some with you.

I chose to do a 31 random things about me as I am stepping into my 31st year today, the 31st.. And it turned out to be the hardest one to write.

1. I was born in Chennai, India
2. I am 30 today
3. I love travelling and if I won the lottery, I know exactly where I’ll go first
4. I have a bachelors in Chemical Engineering and a masters in Computing Info Systems
5. I live in East Lansing, Michigan in the U.S. with my loving wife Priya. Go Spartans!
6. I have been married to Priya for 801 days
7. I have a little brother & a sister living in Chennai.
8. My parents live in Chennai too in the house I grew up.
9. Our house is less than a mile from the airport and grew up watching airplanes flying in and out of the airport from our terrace.
10. Our current house in E.Lansing is 5 miles from the airport and I still love to watch the airplanes fly in and out from our deck in summer nights.
11. I can’t ski but enjoy long walks with my wife.
12. I love playing pool even though I am not good at it.
13. I play in a BCA 8-ball pool league (in my 7th season).
14. I love playing volleyball - I am in a long break since Sep after an ankle sprain.
15. I drive a Mitsubishi Eclipse - always wanted a sports car!
16. I enjoy bowling. I once scored 222 on a Thanksgiving day just to see my buddy score 223.
17. I never played any kind of sport for the best part of my life.
18. I like cooking but hate cleaning up after.
19. I enjoy fiction - Irving Wallace, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum, Michael Crichton kind of books and an occasional book like ‘The World is Flat’.
20. I can’t swim well but love to be in the water.
21. I am very bad at returning phone calls. Friend, if you haven’t heard from me just know it’s not personal. I’m just lazy at that.
22. I love nature and Grand Canyon has to be the best place I have been to.
23. I registered ShanKrila.com in Sep 2006 in hopes of creating our family website with pictures & such. ShanKri-la is a play on the word - Shangri-la. shan being a part of my wife’s name and the K, is of course me.
24. I love movies - comedy, mystery, drama & action. For a geek, I really don’t enjoy Sci-fi as much. Recent favorite - Charlie Wilson’s War. All time favorite - Forrest Gump.
25. Favorite actors - Rajnikanth (tamil), Tom Hanks, Will Smith & Adam Sandler.
26. Favorite actresses - Asin (tamil), Catherine Zeta Jones & Julia Roberts.
27. I wear a lot of hats in my day job and love it. No, I am not a male model. Far from it, actually.
28. I am running out of things to write.
29. My favorite food - Lamb Briyani (a spicy aromatic Indian rice dish). Obvious plug: SpicyTasty.com - the best Indian Recipes site. Ever. (honey, did you read this?)
30. My favorite cuisine - Indian (surprise!), Mexican, Thai & Italian.
31. I am Karthik Ramadoss. Nice to meet you too.

Priya & Karthik

If this hasn’t put you to sleep, I don’t know what will. Thanks for sticking along with me and you are the reason I am blogging.

Just wanted to wish each and everyone of my readers, a very Happy New Year!

I am so thankful for the support and encouragement you have shown. I have had so much fun last year blogging here  I have gained many new readers as well as made some good friends.

If you are reading this post, I invite you to come out of hiding and say hi. We have a very friendly community here and everyone loves to help one another.

I am not too big into resolutions as I forget about it in a few days anyways. I do admire people who can make one and follow it up throughout the year.

Do you have a new year resolution?

If you have a blog or a website, I am sure you love checking different stats from time to time. I have to confess that I have caught myself obsessing over some of these numbers in the 9-10 months of blogging. I have used Xinu, Website Grader, Bad Neighborhood & BuiltWith to get a quick summary of various stats about ShanKri-la or any other blog/site I am curious about.

DnScoop offers us various stats about your site and has been put together by Badi Jones. Here are a few things you can get from DnScoop:

• Age of a domain - older domains tend to rank better. Although I started blogging in March’07, I registered my domain 1 year, 3 months & 10 days back.
• Google PageRank - Shows your PR & verifies if it’s valid.
• Inbound Links - Shows the number of inbound links. Did you know ShanKri-la has 20,000+ inbound links. I know that’s freaking awesome.
• Alexa Rank - in addition to showing your Alexa rank, it also shows which breakdown your blog belongs to
• IP neighbors - If you use share hosting, it shows which others sites share your IP address. You can see if your IP is shared by a bunch of porn/splog sites which could be a negative thing. Mine shows that I share my IP with 330 other sites! Wow.
• Link Value Report - Based on the above stats, they give you the value of a link in your blog if you monetize it with Text Link Ads. ShanKri-la’s estimate: $19/month for a link.
  That is very tempting but is it worth the Google PageRank slap. I think I might wait a little bit more before I venture into this. If you are interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, I have some changes coming up in the New Year to facilitate just that.
• Site Value Report - Again based on the above estimates, you could find out what is your site’s perceived worth. They estimate ShanKri-la’s to be $11,639! I have no intention of selling ShanKri-la, just for the record.
  If you are really proud of your blog, they provide a snippet of code to display your blog’s worth in your sidebar.

As you can see there are many ways to quickly get a feel for your blog stats. Obsessing over these numbers isn’t the best thing about blogging but it doesn’t hurt either to do it at some level as these can serve to improve your blog in many ways.

But, content and your readers have to come first. That is the sure way to success and the rest is just to help your blog get better and stay healthy.

Merry Christmas to all my readers celebrating tomorrow!

[via Blog About Your Blog] 

Ever since I have started blogging, I have been amazed at how helpful, friendly and nice my fellow bloggers are. I have never been turned down a favor or help. Blogging must bring the best out of us.

Jeanne Dininni of Writers Notes has been kind enough to award me an awesome award just in time for the weekend! NICE MATTERS Award! The concept behind that is you could have great content. But, what makes a great blog even more personable is if the author is kind, helpful and respect their readers comments and opinions.

Check out Jeanne’s blog and you will find that she absolutely deserved this award. I have to give this to a few fellow bloggers who have been really nice to me. You guys rock the blogging world!
Please don’t feel that you must pass this on or that this is a meme.

• Stephen - Scratch99
• Garry - GarryConn.com
• Brown - Brown Thoughts
• Mark - MeAndMyDrum
• Kyle - Kyle’s Cove
• Shankar - Shankar Ganesh
• Tish - ChattieKat

Thank you

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I just wanted to thank everyone who reads my blog and motivating me to keep going forward. Also, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to visit ShanKri-la’s page at RSSHugger and stumbling it.

ShanKri-la is now at Number 6 in the top 100 blogs for December! We couldn’t have done this without you! So, thank you! We are just 14 views short of making it to Number 4!

Also, I wanted to thank FreoReviews, About Blog Contests, Free Flip Vid Cameras, Free Site Reviews for getting in my ScratchBack Topspots! It is much appreciated.

I have some juicy good reads coming up tomorrow and a smashing new post I am really excited about on Monday! Have a great weekend everyone.