When inspiration strikes, it comes hard and fast. You have the idea, everything is clear. It’s like when you wake up from a dream and everything is so vivid in your mind. The problem is, much like when the dream starts to fade after a couple of hours of your morning routine, the killer idea can fade as well. Here’s what I like to do: document every single detail that you can about the idea while it’s fresh! This doesn’t sound like rocket science, and it’s not. That being said, I can’t tell you how many times I have neglected to do it because I was sure that I wouldn’t forget it and then the next day it’s *poof* gone.
This happened a lot back in my band days. If I was sitting down at the guitar just jamming away, minding my own business, a lot of times that’s when the next killer hook for a song would show up. Sometimes it was an accident, sometimes it was playing in a different tuning than I was used to, either way it would happen and then 9 times out of 10 I would tell myself that this hook was so awesome I would never forget it. Then I put my guitar down, went and had some dinner, went to bed, and the next day at practice time I couldn’t even remember what chord the killer hook started with. To this day I am convinced that I have written way too many monster songs and then forgotten them all. What was the solution? A simple tape recorder. If I hit record, got that idea on tape, then it was there forever. Maybe I wouldn’t even come back to it until months later, but it still rocked.
You can do the same thing with your marketing ideas. Get it on paper somehow. Maybe you carry a little notepad & pencil with you everywhere (you never know when inspiration will strike), or maybe you type it into your iPhone or Blackberry, or maybe you call your own voicemail and leave a verbal copy of the idea. Next time you don’t know what to do, go through your killer ideas file, you are almost guaranteed to get fired up about a concept that you forgot and voila! Time to make some money!
That’s all for today. I’m out.