GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 2 - October 2007

16 GPWA TIMES | GPWA affiliate interview series INTERVIEWWITH Aksana Radaman | aksana Current Hometown: Minsk, Belarus Age: 23 Favorite food: Roasted salmon with vegetables and everything with chicken One book everyone must read: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Site: 777-online-gambling.net For Aksana,Nothing Beats BeingYour Own Boss. CONTINUED ON PAGE 46 >> H ow did you become interested in gambling? My husband helped me learn about gambling although he also knew nothing about it. In 2005, I was a fifth-year student and it was time to find my place in life. I needed to find a job where I could apply my knowledge and get a good salary. I started working as a software developer. At first, this job seemed very good for me and I was very happy to work there. But I hated to wake up early and the salary was not so good. At the same time my future husband told me about his friend, and about his friend’s business. I was interested in this business, although it was gambling, which was unknown to me. My husband’s friend explained what online gambling was, how much I could earn, and what I needed to do. Then I started working, working and working. How did you learn about the online gaming industry? From the GPWA, of course. It was my first source, and it has been very interesting and useful for me. Thanks to the GPWA forum and GPWA members, I now know a lot of things about the online gam- bling industry. What languages do you speak? Russian, Belorussian and English. English is not your first language, yet both of your portals are English- language sites. Why did you choose to operate English-language sites? And what difficulties have you faced in running a site that’s not in your native tongue? I chose English because it’s an international language, and most people know it. That was the first reason. The second reason was that my friend told me that the best players were Americans; they liked to gamble, and an English site would bring good money. I had some difficulties with my English site when I started it. Although I knew English, I didn’t know gambling English. So I read gambling articles and visited gambling sites to learn the correct idioms. Even now my site contains some mistakes, but soon I hope I’ll update all my content when I have enough time. Have you thought about creating a Russian-language portal? Yes, I’m still thinking about it. Now I have only a subdomain, r u . 7 7 7 - o n l i n e - g amb l i n g . n e t , which has some Russian traffic. I’m planning to improve it, add more reviews and monitor the results. Maybe I will create a Russian- language portal, but it will be later. You recently left a full-time job as a software developer to work exclusively as a webmaster. Could you please describe the thought process of your decision? It was very difficult for me, because it was unusual for me to leave a job in a good company, which is well known abroad. So, I was afraid to leave it because every month I had a fixed salary. I had been working there for 2 years, and every morning when I went to work I was thinking only aboutmy site anddreaming how I would leave this company. After my working day I worked at home with my site. I wanted to leave the company as soon as possible and therefore I worked on my site as much as I could. At the end of 2006 my site started to bring me some revenue, but it was not enough to leave the company. At the same time I was offered the opportunity to work at an affiliate program as a software engineer. This would allow me to leave the company and work at home, and