Question of the day here today is about trademarking a name and when you should file for trademark registration?
I was talking to a client yesterday and one of the questions we were talking about was when they should trademark their brand or their logo or whatever. This is a great question. The appropriate legal answer is that you should trademark your brand name as soon as you possibly can. That's not always practical. There's some people that for whatever reason, because the money is tight or whatever, they can't do it right away.
If you've got a really good idea for a brand and you want to make sure nobody else starts stealing your intellectual property, you need to get that trademark as soon as possible. Get that puppy trademark. So that would be my official legal recommendation is to anyone who asks, you need to get it done as soon as possible.
Now there's a couple of ways that you can go about trademarking a brand, especially when you're just starting out. The first way is if you're actually using it to sell products or services, then you can just go ahead and file a trademark application to get it trademarked immediately. If you're not yet using it to sell products or services, but maybe you've got it on your website and you're just kind of starting to build up a business, but you haven't actually used it to sell anything yet and you've got a great idea and you want to make sure nobody steals it, then you can file what's called a Notice of Use Trademark Application, which it's the same application. You just check a different box in the application.
Basically, what happens is you go through the same process. Then, you're given a period of time where you can start using the trademark because the trademark doesn't actually provide you any protection unless you're selling a good or service. And so, what you get is you get extra time to start selling your good or service. Your goods or services, maybe that's a better way to say that. Anyway, you get extra time. And then if within that period of time, you can either file for an extension. Or if you start using your trademark, you file a notice that you've started using the trademark. And then the trademark will register, and then you're good to go from there.
But if not, then you get an extension and you've got a couple extensions. So in all, I'll told you can get a couple of years to basically start using that trademark. And if you don't start using the trademark, then you can just abandon the application and it goes back out there into the worlds. Anybody else could apply for that trademark if they wanted to. My advice to you is if you're looking to build a business or a brand that you really want to grow and you think that you've got a really great name that you want to protect, then you want to trademark that brand or name as soon as possible.
I think a great example of this was, and I forget her name, the woman who created SPANX. She didn't tell anybody about her brand for a year, for at least a year. There was an interview I heard where she was talking about this. here is the link to the interview. It was on a podcast and she talked about how she went through methodical steps to do everything she could to protect the brand SPANX through she filing her patent application, getting the process patented and the trademark and everything else, as soon as she possibly could without telling anyone about what she was doing.
And then when the time came for her to start selling, she had it all in place. That's a great example of why you need to do it early because she had a great name, a great concept that she want to make sure it was protected. I'll do another video on all the different reasons why you should trademark your brand. If you want to do the trademark application yourself, I don't recommend it, but you can do it yourself. If you've got a good name, that's easy to trademark.
You can probably do it for the cost of the filing fee, which is around $300. If you really want some legal guidance and you want to do a search and you want to figure out if anyone else is using this trademark and you want some help doing all that, you've got two choices. You can either hire an attorney, which this is something that we do to do this for you, or you can join our DIY legal program where we do a tutorial on how to trademark your brand and how to come up with a good name and all those types of things. And that's something that we're going to include in that program. So, there are other ways to do it that are little bit less expensive.
Anyway, that's it for today. I hope you're having a great day. I will talk to you more about why you should trademark your brand. So, that's it. Have a good one!
