Distro of the Month

If you haven’t been reading here long, or have simply been under a rock, you may not know that I am one of four partners in a little web venture that we like to call Distro of the Month.  DOTM for short.

We’ve been running the business for a little over a year now.(our 12th mailing went out in October) The problem exists that even after 14 months, we are not even approaching profitability.  We knew going into this that we wouldn’t ever make ourselves millionaires with the business just because of the nature of it.  There are limitations as to what we can charge based on the licenses of the Linux Distributions that we use.

Part of our issue is that we’re mailing cd’s in a broadband world.  There aren’t many people(read geeks) who would want to try a different Linux distro each month that don’t have access to a broadband pipeline and could easily download the same linux distro for themselves.  Of course, they wouldn’t get our nice little newsletter on each months distro and they would have to find the new distros for themselves.

The other part of the issue is that we have a subpar webpage(visit it here) and we haven’t the funds to do any actual advertisement(read the above comments on non-profitability).  As a result of our lack of advertisement, we have a very hard time getting new leads and an even harder time getting new subscribers.

So where am I going with this?  I’m not entirely sure. It’s getting a little tiresome.  I’d love to give it a harder go, but the funds just aren’t available to put into a full fledged advertisement campaign.  I’ve done what SEO that I know to limited results(I don’t know all that much), and our limited(monthly) activity doesn’t necessarily lend itself to dynamic content that would help with traffic.  We do have a forums, and a blog(hardly ever updated) that we run off of the site, but with little results.

What I’d like is for you, constant reader, to take a look at the website.  Come back here or leave this window open and then give me your thoughts.  Got some wild ideas for the website?  A hot tip or idea?  Let me hear it.  There won’t be any compensation, just a little good will in return.  Or maybe you wanna buy 1/4th of the biz?  Let me know and we’ll work on something. 😉

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