When you’re a new business owner, you have a million things to worry about. You have to carefully execute everything relating to your business plan, oversee marketing initiatives, sales activities and targets, and you have to also draw in your audience. In all this chaos, you might end up forgetting one of the most important things about modern businesses, namely branding through trademarks, and the need to register your trademark to protect your business and your product. Keep reading to find out more about registering trademarks in the United States –why you should do it, what to do and what not to do.

Getting your trademark or trademarks registered will help you play on offensive and on defensive at the same time. For one thing, registering your trademarks makes you uniquely identifiable to consumers, which is vital to building a loyal following. Trademarks give businesses and/or products a public face and a public name, and it sets their products apart. Indeed, capitalism and trademarks or brands go so well together that we are starting to see the emergence of computer or mobile game quizzes based on brand recognition, where you have to pay if you want to play.

On the other hand, registering your trademark allows you to play on the defensive and protect your business and your brand from unauthorized use and abuse by competitors and laypersons alike. Once you register a trademark, you become empowered to take legal action against anyone using it without your expressed permission. However, you also have the right to sell the trademark—this can bring in a huge profit if your brand is wildly recognizable—or you can license other companies and allow them to use your trademark—for whatever fee you agree on. When you have a registered trademark you’re protected against anyone looking to damage your professional reputation, or to help themselves to a share of your pie.

Once you have a registered trademark, and are working with a trademark registration company, they can run a world-wide periodical trademark search to make sure there are no infringements on your Intellectual Property rights. If any such trademark search brings forth a competitor using a trademark too similar to yours, you can start legal proceedings and demand compensation.

But, before you get so far, you have to do your own trademark search to make sure you’re not infringing on anyone else’s rights. You won’t be allowed to register a trademark that bears great similarity to another which is in use in your industry, as you may appear to be acting in bad faith towards a competitor. This is why you need to take your trademark search seriously, in order to avoid future problems, delays or expenses which can’t be unmade.


You should always do at least one US trademark search http://www.trademarkdirect.com before starting thetrademarks http://www.trademarkdirect.com registration process, to make sure you don’t have to go back to the drawing board if your chosen trademarks doesn’t pass all the checks a trademark registration company will perform, and to make sure your application won’t be contested.