I am somewhat surprised at the result of the poll.
CONTENT rules every time. Agreed your opening words and the overall appearance of the site needs to arouse curiosity and make people want to go on and explore further than your landing page. Content is ultimately the only thing that will get you ranked high with the search engines. You can put as many keywords as you like, but if they don't appear in, or have any relevance to your content or the content simply isn't there, the search engines will ignore your page.
What really makes me really angry is sites that offer you something free on the front page then when you have given them your name and/or email you find that the REAL product is on offer as an 'upgrade' or that the 'free' only applies for a brief period and ultimately you are being asked to pay to get what is on offer. Even if you don't buy then, if you've given your email you'll get spam forever.
There are also a huge amount of sites offering e-books at up to $97 that you can get for less than $10 on Clickbank or ebay or even free. Google for the title before you hit the pay button.
These are basically dishonest marketing techniques, do you really want to copy them? If someone is offering you something free, be VERY SUSPICIOUS. Either there are hidden costs and conditions or its a scam.
I checked out all the URL's in this thread. Only one or two showed ANY evidence that the owner had done any work of their own to create content. Others just cloaked affiliate sites for other opportunities. You have a fantastic resource in your GDI domain and hosting - why waste it like that? If the person landing on your site has already seen that opportunity, 99% of the time, they will just click away immediately.
GDI is a great business but it IS going to cost you money to promote it to the point it becomes cash-negative or your commissions actually exceed your subscription each month. And don't forget, every second you spend promoting it is also a 'cost', so even the so called free traffic generators are not really 'free'. To make it really attractive you have to add value to it in some way, by providing original content before you take the visitor to the opportunity.
So, to re-cap, if you hadn't found these sites here in this post, how WOULD you have got to them? Basically unless the owner had sent you an email with the link, you had googled directly for the domain name or something similar and got it by accident, or you had found the link on a site like Linkreferral, you would almost certainly NEVER have found them and if you had, except for
www.blue-swan.ws, I can find nothing truly original whatever.
There are ZILLIONS of sites out there for people to look at. Ask yourself why people should look at yours rather than someone else's GDI site or another opportunity altogether?