COVID Good News: COVID-19 news is mostly bad. We share good news only.

At the beginning of March, I became obsessed with reading COVID-19 news stories. Sitting at home all day, it was easy to scroll through Twitter and other news platforms, endlessly ingesting a torrent of bad news. I quickly noticed that my mental health was taking a turn for the worse and yet, I found it difficult to stop reading the news. At the same time, new leads at my two web development businesses quickly dried up, leaving me with a lot of free time on my hand. While I’ve spent most of it dedicated to working on new marketing initiatives that have been on the back burner for quite some time, there is only so much marketing that one person can do. With a significant amount of free time on my hand, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and COVID Good News was born. COVID Good News is a news aggregator with a simple mission. We share good news stories focusing on the people who are helping the world through this crisis and the science that points a way forward. The site idea was conceived last Friday and it launched today. The site was put together with low cost in mind as it clearly has a limited shelf life and it will be difficult to monetize. It took one developer about 6-8 hours to edit the default WordPress theme to create a) a workable frontend and b) a backend that allows for stories to be easily added. The site is curated using articles from multiple RSS feeds (I’m using Feedly) so there is some additional daily work that is required. At the moment, I am performing it as I want to get a handle on what the task looks like before I consider outsourcing it to a VA. Furthermore, it definitely helps with my own anxiety to read some good news. When a post is added to the site, it is shared through to Facebook and Twitter automatically using the site’s own RSS feed and dlvr.it, a low cost social media sharing tool that I only recently discovered and has worked flawlessly so far. I am now in the marketing phase as I try to get more eyeballs on the site and hopefully gain some viral momentum. Having worked on many small projects with a similar scope, I realize it’s going to be an uphill battle. If you have any marketing ideas, I am all ears.