The thing that helped me achieve my first lucid dreams has to be my dream journal. I go back through it from time to time and its amazing how quickly my remembrance and number of dreams per night increased once I started recording them. I went from having maybe just a small bit of a memory of one dream each night, to easily having and recording 4 or 5 per night. This happened over the period of a about a month.
It wasn't hard. I just kept a notebook by my bed and would try and will myself each night when I went to sleep to wake up after each dream. As soon as I woke up, I would immediately grab the journal and jot down keywords that would help me remember the dream in the morning.
So the first night, I didn't wake up until the morning, but I had a dream scrap in my head, and I wrote down that little scrap, something along the lines of "dreamt about the weird house on Kelly".
Each night those scraps became more detailed, and then eventually I was waking up in the middle of the night with dreams fresh in my head, recording each and every one of them.
If you have 5 dreams a night, that gives you 5 shots at lucidity, which is much better than 1 as I am sure you know.
So if you have been discounting the need for a dream journal, DON'T! In my opinion it is probably the most important part of the entire learning process.