Whenever I decide to develop a new product and put it on a new website one of the first things I check is whether the domiain name is available and then I check the Australian and US Patents office to check if there are any trademarks of patents that cover the name I have come up with.

Getting protection for your intellectual property is both necessary and can be costly.

Protecting your own product from intellectual theft is tricky. If you have created your product from an existing product that is in the market and doesn’t have a patent, then there is no protection other than trademarking your brand and buying the website domain names. Unless you have created something completely unique from another product then you may in fact be eligible to patent it. This is the part where you need to get expert advice and I am no expert in this regard.

The critical steps when creating a brand is to check the following;

• Is the brand you’re wanting to create already in the market
• If not, is there something similar
• Is the website domain available
• Are the websites in your target country available
• No matter what people say online, a .com website is still best
• In Australia I also register the .com.au websites as backup
• Try and be as original as possible
• Make the name short and easily remembered
• Try to incorporate what your product does with you name

The name I came up with a few years ago was Spillrite. One variation of the logo is below;

The trademark needs to be registered in your country and any other country you feel that you want to do business in. Make sure you select the correct categories for your trademark.

You can spend a lot of money on trademarks and websites and in the end someone can still copy your product. My products are copies of existing products so you just need to try and carve out your own identity and then forge ahead. A good product backed by a decent website and selling at a good price in a niche market will beat all the attempts to copy and take your business away.