Global Domains International payment proof and thoughts

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/oIRZt)
I got home yesterday and saw a check come in from Global Domains International. I thought to myself at first, this is great! But then I soon realized I've been with GDI now for well over a year. I can't believe it took me this long to get my first $100.0o commission from Global Domains International.

I have to be honest, I haven't been promoting my GDI business like I should've been promoting it. I'm not making excuses, it's just that GDI was never a main focus of mine. I'm usually just focused on promoting my main sign up bonus site then in promoting individual programs, but this is me and what I think makes sense.

From what I can remember in my promotion efforts is that I would get a lot of people putting in their names and e-mail addresses to see the free GDI movie, but a super large majority of them would never go to the next level and actually take advantage of GDI's 7 day free trial. I definitely made good use of the leads I got though. I would put them through a series of 3 e-mails, more if they continued to show interest in the .ws opportunity.

Check I received from GDI for $103.00.

So, am I saying that Global Domains International is not as easy of a home based business then most people make it out to be? I do have to say that I am. It's true that there are some super duper internet marketers out there getting well over 5 sign ups a week, but at the moment, I'm not one of those marketers. I also believe most people that sign up for GDI are kind of in my same boat.

GDI has been around for awhile, their business opportunity is a great way to build residual income over time if you can get the numbers in. I do think their product is kind of losing its value though. There are so many better ways to get your own domain name and to build your own website using open source code and a separate hosting company.

The cost of a domain name is around $10.00 a year and most basic hosting plans charge around $50.00 a year plus another $20.00 for an e-mail address to go with your domain. Once you have these two things set up, you can very easily jump into a free open source code system like Wordpress or Drupal and have a professional looking CMS website with very minimal effort on your part in a very short time.

Let's do the math on the two, shall we?

$10.00/mo x 12 = $120.00 a year for GDI's website.ws services.

$10.00 domain
$50.00 hosting
$20.00 e-mail account

= about $80.00 a year elsewhere.

So you can actually save money not using GDI.

Then again, most hosting companies also have their own affiliate program through a third party network like Commission Junction or another network. This means you could very easily earn the cost of your hosting and domain plan back with an affiliate company and never pay a monthly fee.

These are things to think about. What's your opinion?