5 Ways To Capture Ideas For Your Legal Marketing Efforts

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Ever have a great idea about something while doing some random chore or activity? Try as you might to remember it later, it eludes you. Frustrating, no?

We’ve talked about how important content creation is in your legal marketing efforts.  We agree that inspiration can come from a variety of sources, and that you should always be on the lookout for legal marketing ideas.  How you promote your law firm’s offerings can come from the subtle way that a waitress gets you to order a second piece of pie, or a headline in an ad that convinces you to buy that doo-dad.

My head is always running in a million directions. How to help my clients, an observation about how someone is doing business the right (or wrong) way, or a random thought. One minute it’s gone, the next … poof.

I tell you, it pisses me off to no end.  It’s like in the old days (before the Interwebs) when you’d hear a line of a song and obsess for days over the name of the song.  Yeah, I’m that kind of person – I get hung up on this sort of thing.

So anyway, lots of great ideas come to me when I’m walking down the street and minding my own business.  That gold used to get lost, but no more.  Here are my top 3 ideas for on-the-go content creation.

1. WordPress App For Android and iPhone. WordPress, my blogging tool of choice, has a handy little app that lets me add content to my blogs whenever I’ve got my phone in my hand.  You can save posts locally on your phone so if you’re 35,000 feet in the air and on an airline that doesn’t offer in-flight wi-fi, you’re still good to go.
2. Posterous and Tumblr. These “blogging lite” web applications (Posterous powers one of my personal sites) allow you to send an email to a specific address and – just like that! – it’s turned into a blog post.  Now that Posterous has added some great features recently, this has become a better option for bloggers than was even previously the case.
3. Email yourself. Yup, I send myself messages all the time.  I have a filter set up that if I receive an email with a specific word in the subject line (no, I’m not telling) it goes into a special folder with ideas.
4. Moleskine. These handy little notebooks come in a variety of sizes, but I use an unlined pocket-sized one that I can keep in my pocket.  It’s a mess, covered with random words and thoughts that make their way into my blog posts.
5. Voicemail To Self. Just like email messages, I send myself voicemails all the time.  Case updates, thoughts on emails I’ve seen from others, whatever – scraps of my knowledge and information.

The bottom line is that legal marketing doesn’t begin or end at any particular moment.  Stuff – good stuff, bad stuff – hits you when and where it chooses.  Your goal is to capture those ideas and sources of inspiration, to think about them, and to integrate them into your legal marketing efforts.

What do you use to capture ideas?

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