Thanks to a bit of luck and a lot of foresight, Danish business administration student, Jan Balslev Pedersen, has a domain worth many, many times more than what he originally paid for it. Pedersen purchased the domain, Online-Casinos.com from Namewinner.com and refers to the purchase price as “a gift”. It lived up to this reference immediately when, within days of purchasing the domain, Pedersen was approached by an online casino company and offered $30,000 for it. Additional offers streamed in too, some for more than $50,000, but Pedersen declined them all, choosing instead to turn the domain into an online gambling portal himself.

Not without experience in this highly competitive industry, Pedersen started a famous Danish casino information site back in 2000, called Casinoportalen.dk. In 2003, he sold Casinoportalen.dk for a hefty profit. “It’s an example of the significant return on investment achievable with a carefully selected domain”, says Pedersen. Since he put so much of his own time and energy into building the company, he was able to keep his startup costs very low. “My start-up costs were minimal because a few friends and I did the work – the startup cash outlay was under $100 as I recall”, he says.

Pedersen also learned a lot from the first experience and used the expertise garnered to build his new site, http://www.online-casinos.com, and today the site attracts at least one approach a week for sums markedly larger than the original offers he received for the site.

Now a veteran in the business, Pedersen notes that both technologies and techniques have advanced considerably since 2000. “Predictably, I had to learn from my mistakes – principally because I did not immediately take on board the critical importance of really good search engine optimization. Knowing what I know now about the industry, I should have visited webmaster forums for free guidance. There is plenty of good and free advice on the Net for new webmasters – it’s just a question of reading, listening and learning in webmaster forums”, the veteran remarked.

He has also learned what type of contents attracts the most visitors to his site and what keeps them coming back for more. He tries to keep his site dynamic and interesting and to focus on providing directories of reliable and safe casinos. The site also includes news updates, gaming information relevant to online gamblers, and detailed information on casino games like blackjack, craps, roulette, slots, and videopoker. There’s even a section with over one hundred free games that attracts players too.

Pedersen targets people looking for online gambling information and he researches a variety of casino sites to review on his site. “Publishing unique and reliable reviews generated by myself is a responsibility I take very seriously”, he says. “If a player uses one of the casinos in my directory I need to be certain that it has been thoroughly tested for all operational aspects and found acceptable, because if that player has a problem I have an obligation to help him resolve it with the online casino if I am to retain my own and the site’s credibility”.