IRL Experience Design

#TheEurekaRoom

Eureka Room Update – The Weird Austin List of Things To Do

Note: This post was drafted on 4/21 and finalized today.

The Eureka Room Plan

At a high level, the plan for the Eureka Room is just two things:

  1. Make awesome experiences.
  2. Get awesome people who will love those awesome experiences to pay for those awesome experiences.

Or, using more businessy terms:

  1. Product Development
  2. Sales and Marketing

I have blogged every day (with a couple exceptions) since September. By “blogged” I mean either wrote a draft or edited a draft and posted it. I post twice a week. So since I write seven days a week, I end up on average with 2 full posts and 3 drafts. I usually only spend 2 days on any given post.

A couple weeks ago I decided to focus on some SEO-related stuff. Here’s one of the things I’d like to see happe:

  1. Visitors or Austinites web search for “weird austin things to do” or related.
  2. The top natural result is a page I create. (Which they click on).
  3. The first thing on that page is The Eureka Room.

What Weird Austin Lists Exist Today?

Looking at other lists out there, they were pretty paltry and frequently out of date. There’s some lists with just 5 things on them. (But apparently some really good SEO….)

I knew I could do way better and set the goal at 101 weird and unique things. My first thought was to set up a whole separate site for this, like I’ve done in the past for other endeavors. But instead I decided to make it a main navigational page on my blog. This is for two reason:

  1. The content is pretty related to what I write about on IRLXD. Austin IRL Experience Design? Yes.
  2. From what I found in my research Google doesn’t care too much if you have keywords in your domain name, so there might not even be any real benefit to having a site so narrowly focused.

The Austin Weird 101 List Is Born

After working on it every day during my “blogging time”, I have a list of Weird and Unique Austin Things To Do. I’m very proud of. (Note: as of 4/19/22 the list has been split into two lists: the weird things to do in Austin list and the unique things to do in Austin list.)

I also couldn’t help but to make some distinctions that I found lacking on other weird Austin sites. For example, are the bats “weird”? I don’t think so. But they are very unique. Is urban axe throwing, which is found all over the world now “weird” or  “unique” to Austin? Not really. But it’s unusual and fun. I think lumping these things in as “weird” is being disingenous to the weirdos. I also think that people who are searching for “weird” aren’t looking for things they can do in their own city or bats.

So I broke out the categories into: weird, unique, and usual. I think that will be useful to the real “weird” seekers. 

A Few Milestones For The Blog

As a side note, this page brought me to a few milestones for the blog:

  1. A new record size for a post/page. The Austin Weird 101+ page is the biggest on the site, by far. It has almost 7,000 words. According to my wordpress stats, it would take you 25 minutes to read it all. And I haven’t even finished with the details yet.
  2. I broke the google doc. I typically draft my posts in google docs, then move it over to wordpress for final editing. My Google doc has gotten so big it started acting slowly and was hard to edit. I did a word count and found I had over 135,000 words in it! That’s over two and a half novels’ worth of words. So I broke it up into two documents. 
  3. The blog now has over 110,000+ words. The wordpress stats say it would take nearly 8 hours to read it all. I’m constantly amazed at how things add up quickly.