Okay, so I promised to explain how to do a trademark search in my last post, so here it is as promised.  However, first I want to ramble a bit about when or why you would need to do a trademark search.

Doing a trademark search is a process that is very important for domainers, as investing in trademarked domains can be both risky and very costly.   An example would be purchasing something like FacebookApplications.com.   Because the term Facebook is trademarked, if someone that isn’t Facebook purchases a domain like this, it can easily be demonstrated that they are trying to make money off the Facebook name.  In other words, if Facebook goes after it, the courts will turn this domain over to Facebook.

If you hand registered the name trademark risk probably isn’t a huge deal, but domainers will often spend $100,000.00+ for individual domain names, so they need to know their investment is safe.   This is why generic domains are so valuable, because they are terms that can’t be trademarked (an example would be the term restaurant, instead of the term McDonalds).

Anyway, I digress.  For affiliate marketers or anyone that builds a lot of different smaller websites, a trademark search can also be important.  If you are starting a company with the name or plan to invest many years into a website, you’ll want to know someone can’t just come and easily take it from you.

In order to do a trademark search, you just need to do the following:

  1. Visit the US government’s sitesearch page.
  2. Click Search at the top of the right menu.
  3. Click New User Form Search (Basic).
  4. In the Search Term field, you’ll want to enter your domain name.
  5. Click Submit Query.

When doing your search, you’ll want to make sure to search for your term with and without spaces.  An example would be if you were looking for Slick Affiliate, you would try both “slick affiliate” and “slickaffiliate”.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying trademarks, both in how they work and how people lose trademark battles.  I’m also married to an attorney, which helps as well.  Any other questions about trademarks or trademark searches?  Please let me know in the comments below and I’ll do my best to elaborate!