In this day of age, it has become important for business owners to protect their unique brands online. There are thousands of new businesses that form everyday, and eventually, someone is going to come along and establish a business name either the same as your business, or very similar. Additionally, they are going to register their domain name, if available, to promote their business.

While unique brands are easier to protect, it is almost impossible to protect generic business names. However, it can still be done in a variety of situations. In this post, I am going to address protecting unique brands.

How do you protect your brands? Well, this is a matter of opinion on the steps to execute. So I will share my opinion on how to do this effectively. The first step for any business is to secure their domain name. Of course, we all know most new businesses fail to accomplish this task and is one of the reasons the domain aftermarket exists. You would assume that the second step is to Trademark your business name, however, this is not so. The second step is secure any additional domain names that describe your business, and any domains that can be confused with your business name, to include typos.  The whole purpose of taking this action is to keep your business name unique, and to limit anyone from profiting and competing with your brand. This is the most overlooked step in the online business world and is why many domainers earn big $$$ through PPC. Step three is to trademark your business name and register any copyrights or patents. Step three is not always necessary, and it is based on what your goals are for the business. Step four is to register your business name in the state the business is conducting business.

The reason I wrote this post is due to Elliot Silver sending me an email of an article found on techcrunch.com. The article is about a new company formed in August 2009 that develops Location API software. The name of the company is SimpleGeo.com and they have filed a trademark. Elliot told me that he immediately thought of SimplyGeo.com when he read this article because of the domain.

While the trademark and nature of the business does not effect our brand, I feel the domain absolutely could in the future. While SimplyGeo.com is no major global brand, it has the potential to become a small powerhouse in the market we conduct business in. I can assure you that we secured all the domains that could be made into a business by using our SimplyGeo.com brand. However, we failed at securing the domain SimpleGeo.com because it was registered 1 month earlier and a developed site. I even wrote the owner and did not receive a response. So I assumed it would be registered for years and we were good to go.  Unfortunately, I was wrong and the domain expired this year and so the new company was formed, SimpleGeo.com.

The lesson here is stay proactive and always track domains that complement your brand so your brand stays unique. This probably happens to an abundance of business owners with unique brands online. I hope by sharing our failure with readers, we can assist others from making the same mistake. We may challenge the trademark application because we are in the local business and eventually, SimpleGeo.com location API software will be another local platform tool. I will keep you updated.  Funny, your once unique brand is no longer so unique!

The bottom line is if you do not go the distance to protect your brands, someone else will under their terms. Securing the domain name is only the first step. You have to stay proactive if your goal is to establish a powerful unique brand.