Try to make as short as possible the temporal distance between announcing a new idea publicly (whether via conference presentation or even just via participating Q&As at conferences) and submitting a paper with that idea to a journal.
If you wait too long, you will likely find yourself being asked by reviewers to cite someone else's paper with the same or astonishingly similar idea published in the interregnum (between your making public the idea and submitting the paper), or will be informed by a reviewer the claim you are making is not very substantive because everyone already knows that.
There is no way to tell whether either of these responses is because you yourself put the idea out there and it's been digested by the relevant community. Surely this happens sometimes, but sometimes ideas just happen to be in the air, and it doesn't matter anyhow because there is nothing you can do. There is never anything to be gained by bringing it up to the journal editor who simply cannot be put into a "he said, she said" type of situation with respect to you and her reviewers. The main point is that if you had submitted the paper earlier, the reviewers would not have been able to respond that way. That is, if the idea was good enough to get accepted to a conference, or if noted scholars in the field encourage you to publish it after you share it, then you should submit it to a journal as soon as possible.
Finally, if/when you find the above happening to you, take some solace in the fact that the individuation of ideas is very slippery. In the majority of cases, the paper published by someone else in the interregnum is different enough from your own paper that you buck it up and rewrite the thing, differentiating your view from the other person's. With respect to "everyone already knows that" you just have to double down on showing how people's published views are inconsistent with the idea you are putting forward. This usually works, sometimes you are out of luck though (my ratio when this kind of thing happens seems to be from thee to one to four to one chance of the paper ever getting published).
I think I get hit by this thing worse than most people because after my dissertation I had for over a decade a weird neurotic fear that I was going to run out of ideas. As a result I always wanted to have three or four that I hadn't submitted yet but that wouldn't be too much work to submit. So with respect to some ideas, the length of time between presenting them publicly and publishing them has been from five to fifteen years. But given how quickly things develop and how small are the relevant intellectual communities, even three years is plenty of time for the unfolding of Spirit to get ahead of you in the irritating way where a rejection notice cites someone else for making an idea you might have had first. So again, my advice is not to let this happen. Especially if you don't have tenure, work very hard to get over whatever psychological motivations you might have for not getting your papers out to journals (these kinds of self-defeating psychological motivations with respect to publication are interesting in their own right).
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