Register Your Trademark

Episode 921: Register Your Trademark, with Joey Vitale

Register your trademark to protect your company’s brand. Learn from Joey Vitale on why it’s so important to register your trademark.

In today’s podcast, Joey Vitale will discuss the importance of why you need to register your trademark. You will learn a lot because he is an attorney and business strategist for thriving entrepreneurs. As the Founding Attorney of Indie Law, Joey works with small business owners to protect their passions and give them the legal foundation they need to thrive and make an impact. Outside of his firm, Joey provides courses, presentations, and workshops that focus on the legal issues that matter most: trademarks, business formation, copyrights, and contracts. While based in Chicago, Indie Law serves business owners all over the country.

What you will learn from this episode about why you need to register your trademark:

• Why Joey decided to break out on his own and began working with small businesses to help them protect their assets
• Why you need to register your trademark and how Joey helps his clients better understand and navigate these issues
• Why niching down and becoming the expert in his niche has been tremendously helpful in growing Joey’s business
• Why half of the 500,000 trademark applications filed last year failed, primarily due to an existing or very similar trademark in place
• Why trademarking descriptive words and phrases is becoming a major trend impacting sellers on e-commerce sites like Etsy
• How Joey and his team help business owners monitor words and phrases that appear on their goods to help protect them from others who attempt to trademark those words
• Why it is important for business owners to be proactive in protecting themselves, and what resources business owners can use to better understand trademark
• How “common law trademark” and “registered trademark” differ, and how to use the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) located at https://uspto.gov
• Why protecting yourself with trademarks proactively is far more cost-effective than trying to fix problems after the fact, and why an attorney’s assistance is invaluable
• How social media platforms are increasingly becoming protective of their names and are going after educators for using the platform name in the title of their courses
• How you can protect your company’s brand once your register your trademark

Resources:

• Website: https://indielaw.com/
• Free Indie Law guide to the four biggest trademark mistakes to avoid: https://indielaw.com/freeguide-1/
• TESS Trademark Database: www.uspto.gov
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/joeycvitale/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/indielawfirm
• Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/levelupyourlegalside/?source_id=306914809658065
• Get to know the basics before you register your trademark

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Register your trademark by learning about these branding fundamentals

 

 

Register Your Trademark: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built in, and how they scaled their business. And I know I’ve been talking about this consistently, and almost every single episode now. But if you have not taken time to visit our resources library on PredictiveROI.com, I strongly encourage you to do so because we are building it out like we have never built it out before.

 

We’re consistently adding new ebooks. I think we just finished up five in the last few weeks. We’re adding free webinars and courses and nothing with a call to action on the back end of it. It is all just free teaching. Great stuff that we have compiled from the brilliant insights shared by our very generous guests. So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources and whatever you request we will send it right to your inbox.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Joey Vitale’s Introduction

 

Before we welcome today’s very special guest. And he’s going to address an extremely critical topic. And I know that might sound like a little bit hyperbole Onward Nation, but trust me, it is that important. His name is Joey Vitale. And so let me give you some additional context around why I was super excited when our mutual friend Craig Cody, suggested that I connect with Joey, and we did and had a great conversation and thought, okay, you need to share this information Joey, with Onward Nation business owners, we’re going to talk a lot about trademarks.

 

Now, I get it on the surface, you may think, oh, for Pete’s sake, Stephen. Trademarks. Look, years ago, the trademark was kind of like, you know, once you’ve been in business for a while and you’ve gained some traction, maybe now you need to go protect that asset so nobody gets in your space. But as you’ll hear Joey say, that isn’t the case anymore.

 

Onward Nation in his stead. That is becoming super expensive. To try and protect your brand if someone sends you a cease and desist. So now it’s about protecting your assets, being really strategic, about protecting your brand through trademark before your years into building your brand. And he’s going to walk you through several examples that are kind of top of mind in the press today about how that’s happening and how business owners are having to dig in and protect what they have spent years of hard work building.

 

So this is an extremely, not only timely, but super valuable conversation for you Onward Nation. So Joey is also the founder of Indie Law. He works with small business owners just like you to help them protect their business. And when he’s not working with small business owners, he’s in full on teaching mode. So he’s developing courses and presentations and workshops, all to serve business owners just like you.

 

So with that said, welcome to Onward Nation, Joey. 

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Joey’s Path and Journey

 

Oh my gosh, thank you so much. Hi Onward Nation Stephen I wish that I could just carry you around to introduce myself. That would be great. Well, you are awesome my friend, and I’m so glad that Craig made the introductions so we can have this conversation. Look, your bio is impressive the way that you help protect business owners.

 

Awesome. But it’s only a portion of your story. Take us behind the curtain here and tell us more about you and your path, your journey. And then we’ll start the trademark conversation. Absolutely. All right. So, Stephen, I’ll try and give you the kind of short, medium version of my story here, which is that I spent most of my life, I guess, like, as a sheep, just kind of following the herd, doing what I was told to be doing.

 

And that wound me up in law school, when I was there. And then shortly after I started working at the first law firm that I was at, I quickly realized that I had made a huge mistake because I am one of the biggest peacemakers that I know. I hate conflict, and it made me a really bad litigator.

 

And so once I once I realized that, I decided that I was going to try and start my own law firm based on what I was good at, which was helping people proactively think about issues and, you know, build the life and dreams that they want so that they hopefully never wind up in a place like a courtroom.

 

And so I started working with small businesses and doing a lot of the proactive work that you need when you start and grow a business. Everything from copyrights and trademarks to business formations like getting an LLC to drafting interviewing contracts. And as I was doing all of that, I realized that out of all of the work that I was doing, the trademark side of things seemed to be the thing that was helping the clients the most and the thing that they valued the most once we got those in place for them.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Be The Expert That Business Owners Need

 

So about a year ago, we decided to take everything else that we were doing and slowly create course content around them so that we could still be helping business owners. But really focus on trademarks as the service that we’re going to provide for people and I have a feeling that you and I are going to get into why that is.

 

But it’s been such an amazing pivot for me because it allows me to have this hard conversation about a complex legal topic with business owners before stuff starts hitting the fan, so that you can have a more rational, understood response on what your next steps are so that you’re not trying to figure out what to do while you’re also in the heat of battling this out with somebody.

 

Well, and even from just a business owner perspective, being able to I mean, obviously there’s so many different facets to practicing business law and being able to focus your expertise and depth of expertise or building a depth of expertise around trademarks is you then truly become the specialist, the expert, the person that a business owner needs on their team as opposed to, yeah, I do this and I do that, and I do this and I do this.

 

You try to cover 5 or 6 other areas in not covering them very well. You’re super narrowly focused, but then you can really, truly be the expert that a business owner needs, right? Yeah. And I mean, geez, I wish that I knew about Onward Nation years ago when I started, but that concept of niching down and being known for that one thing really has been super helpful, because it’s only after I made that shift that I noticed people were able to describe what I was doing really easily, and I was like, okay, that’s a good sign.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Why Trademarks Are Important

 

Absolutely. Onward Nation, if you care to go back to episode 864, it’s a solo case where we talk all about narrowing and going deep. So that’ll give you some additional context, about what Joe is talking about in going narrow and then really benefiting from it. Let’s Joey, let’s go back to one of the super compelling things that you mentioned to me in the green room in the pre-interview chat.

 

You said to me, Stephen, like trademarks are becoming sort of that new battle, if you will, for the domain name because everybody’s like this kind of wild, wild west grabbing everything. It’s like the gold rush for trademark and so now the kind of staking your claim, planting your flag is sort of like the domain name battle.

 

So why do you feel so strongly like that? What do you see in the trademark space that’s making you kind of equate those two things? Yeah. So you know, when I was first learning all of this stuff and had mentors and resources that were helping me, trademarks were more of this, like the advanced area of the law wasn’t really a necessary thing that business owners were being told that they had to think about right outside the gate.

 

But that is starting to change because your brand, your name is something that you know you want to make sure that you have the rights to use, and it’s becoming harder and harder to make sure that you’re picking something that isn’t stepping on anybody else’s toes. And Stephen, you mentioned domain names, and you and I both know how hard it is when you find a good name or something that’s kind of catchy comes to mind.

 

You want to make sure that you can find the .com, hopefully that’s available. And people are starting to do that with trademarks. And so it’s becoming increasingly harder to find trademarks that aren’t already taken. And what makes trademarks even harder is that when you get a registered trademark in the United States, you don’t just get the rights to that specific trademark, you also get anything that’s confusingly similar.

 

So you get those really broad rights, unlike the kind of very exact domain name that you want to grab where somebody else can just misspell it or add a hyphen or something like that. And so there are now millions of registered trademarks that exist that you have to be mindful of. And last year, half a million applications were filed wholly bananas, and half of those were unsuccessful.

 

So 250,000 failed attempts and they failed. Why? The biggest reason why a trademark application fails is because either, another trademark exists that’s the same. Or like I said, it’s so similar and there’s really no bright line test for that similarity. And so because of that conversation around trademarks has shifted from something that you do later in business, once everything’s validated to no, this is something that you should do as early as possible, because otherwise you face a big risk of not being able to secure your own trademark registration rights.

 

And so if somebody is before you and they’ve secured. 

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Talk To A Lawyer First

 

So let me make sure I’m tracking with you here. So there’s a little bit there’s this gold rush going on. So if somebody is a business owner, if another business has secured more of a broader interpretation of a trademark and then you come along, you want to do something more specific and whatnot, that broader is going to now supersede the more specifics.

 

So you’re going to be on the outside looking in. Am I I tracking with you, star. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, in order for me to explain this in a way that doesn’t bore everybody to death, I am oversimplifying things a little bit. So before you take action on this, definitely talk to an attorney.

 

But trademark rights are created upon first use, not upon the first to file or get the registration. So legally and technically speaking, if you were the first person to use your trademark or anything similar, you have the strongest rights. But practically, the person that secures the registration first has the cheapest way of upholding their claim to it. Okay, okay.

 

Got it. So let’s, I know that you’re also tracking a lot of different examples that are kind of like what? I can’t believe that that’s going on. And so let’s talk about the entrepreneur magazine example that you and I were talking about in the pre-interview, because that really opened my eyes, because clearly I wasn’t as close to this, to this issue as you are.

 

And you really made me think I’m like, wow, that is like really broad sweeping and like industry changing potentially. Right? Yeah. So Entrepreneur Magazine owns the word entrepreneur as a trademark. And on its own in that industry of telling publications and magazines and podcasts are kind of, you know, the closest audio version of a magazine I think we have right now.

 

And so they are pretty similar. And if you don’t enforce your trademark rights, you do risk losing them because of those things. And maybe more that we just don’t know about. Entrepreneur magazine has decided to go after and send cease and desist letters to podcast owners who have a business facing audience that use the word entrepreneur in the title. Staggering. 

 

Yeah, it’s taken the entrepreneur space kind of by storm. Everybody that hears this tends to get upset. Like, you can just kind of feel people’s blood boiling when you start to hear about this. And some people that have received the cease and desist letters have talked about their experience. They promoted it on social media, spread the word about the fact that this is happening and one person has enough of a following and was in and of groups that talked about this to where her post about her issue got seen by Seth Godin, who wrote his own blog post about the issue.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Making Your Business Name Too Generic

 

So I haven’t read Seth’s blog posts, but they give us a CliffsNotes version of it. He was not happy. He said that regardless, and I’m kind of putting words into his mouth a little bit. But regardless of the technical legal rights that entrepreneurs may have, this is a bad business move and it’s a bad PR move.

 

Okay, so based on your experience, in this area, what do you do? You agree that it’s a bad move for them. Bad business move. I do think that in a way they are kind of stuck because they made what I think is a pretty bad decision when they decided to name their magazine Entrepreneur Magazine because it’s too broad or because it’s too broad.

 

It’s so generic and kind of descriptive of what it is, who their target market is. And I say that because as much as we can point fingers at Entrepreneur magazine and say that what they’re doing is wrong, so many business owners do the same thing in terms of naming their business, their podcast, something that’s just so descriptive of what it is that they sell.

 

And if you do that, which, you know, might be helpful in terms of your marketing and SEO and people hearing you and wanting to work with you because they know exactly what you do, there’s a double edged sword to that in terms of the trademark side of things, because if you go with the very descriptive or generic business name and you are able to secure any type of trademark rights for it, then now you are in the tough position where you have to enforce those rights against others.

 

So that’s interesting, right? So it gives you protection, but then also gives you the responsibility to, to protect what you’ve stake, to claim to. Right. And so we are you know, Entrepreneur magazine is an extreme example of this. But we are seeing a lot of businesses kind of go for this short sighted hack of using descriptive names, securing the trademark and then trying to monopolize their space and go after competition by not letting them use these descriptive words.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Businesses With Similar Names

 

Okay. So again, because I know you watch this pretty closely, are there other examples where you’re seeing this play out, around particular words that, maybe business owners might think are public domain. And so they’re going to go ahead and use those. But then somebody that might or business that might on the trademark says not so much.

 

So are you seeing other examples of this play out currently? Yeah. I’m seeing examples in two separate categories. One is for words that are just kind of commonly being used today anyways, like mom print or other variations of entrepreneur or you know, especially female entrepreneur communities who are using like boss or babe in the titles of their brands.

 

Because of how many people are using that. If you decide to secure the trademark rights, which as a business owner, you should do so that you can play defense and not be told that you’re infringing on somebody else’s trademarks, you have to figure out kind of, HR wise, how you’re going to handle businesses who name things similarly.

 

And the other interesting example of this is in the e-commerce space. I have a pretty large Etsy following of people who, you know, are selling handmade products or some types of products. And right now you’re seeing a huge trend in kind of phrase based products. Okay, so whether it’s a mug or a shirt, instead of it being totally plain, people slap some type of a cute phrase on it.

 

What we’re starting to see, particularly on Etsy, is people are filing for trademark rights for those phrases that they’re putting on their stuff, which is not actually a trademark. And then if they get it, they’re trying to prevent all of these other makers from using those phrases on their items. Okay. So like, help us cement this into place.

 

Like what? Is there an example you might be able to share with us? Yeah. So, one of the bigger examples was a couple of years ago, you know, there was this, this trend where people who were creating, like kid and infant clothing. Okay, we put the word mama bear on the shirt, okay? And someone was able to secure a trademark registration for Mama Bear.

 

No kidding. And then used that to send, what’s called the DMCA notice through Etsy to every single other store owner who had the word mama bear on their stuff. Oh my gosh. And the way that Etsy works is that if you get hit with a certain number of those reports, Etsy just assumes that you’re doing something wrong and shuts your store down.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Monitoring The Use of a Similar Word or Phrase

 

Holy buckets. So again, bullies were using that process to say, hey, if we do this enough times, it’ll just wipe out our competition. So we then started to see a lot of newer people at the Etsy store. And one of their biggest fears was, what can I do to make sure I don’t receive a DMCA notice too many times?

 

Because I could be one report away from losing my entire business on Etsy, right? And that becomes it. It may be their biggest or maybe their only distribution channel. So, you know, losing Etsy could mean the end of their business and which is obviously not awesome. Right? Right. And so what we’re now doing for those types of business owners is, whether or not they have trademark rights that they’re wanting to protect themselves, we can monitor phrases that they’re using on their products, which, again, aren’t really trademarks because they’re not really brands.

 

The Trademark office calls that ornamental use of a word or phrase, okay, but we can still monitor those so that if anybody tries to file for rights to it, we can go after them and challenge their application before it gets registered. When we decided to launch Onward Nation as a podcast, you know, we worked with our counsel, and because we weren’t sure at that point of the business strategy, this was four years ago, if we were going to, would it be a book?

 

Would it be this, would it be that we’re just a podcast? We weren’t sure. And so, Sharon Turek, our legal counsel, who did the filing at the time, she’s like, well, okay, let’s file it as a podcast, as a book. So we went kind of as broad as we possibly could, but that was one of the first things that we did in it was, as you know, a long process back and forth, you know, with the PTO, Patent and Trademark Office and, but eventually we did win it, and I felt like it was really important at the onset to start that process.

 

You know, because we knew that the words Onward Nation were an asset that we wanted to make sure that we protected. And so how common is that? Like my guess is it’s not common, if you’re probably encouraging business owners to make it more common. Am I tracking with you? Yeah, absolutely.

 

Unfortunately, we had the conversation quite a bit with clients who were either consulting with us and then we kind of gave them some bad news, or we start working through the process and we apply after they’ve been in business for, you know, five or more years and we run into some issues. And I have to remind them that as much as we want to help them through this, it’s not our fault that they didn’t know this sooner.

 

Sure. And so that is always a difficult conversation and why we’re trying to reach people as quickly as we can in business just to let them know that these issues exist. And, Stephen, are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect? No. What is that? So if you ask somebody if they like how they would rate their knowledge on a certain topic, they are more likely to give a high answer if they don’t actually know that much about it.

 

Oh, really? Okay. And the more they know about it, the more likely it is that they would give themselves a low number because they realize how much they don’t know. Okay. And if you take that one step further, then that means that as somebody starts to learn more about a topic, as their competence grows in an area, their confidence starts to decrease.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: The Biggest Trademark Mistakes

 

Okay. And so we, you know, because trademarks are not this transactional thing, like getting a domain name or getting an LLC, which a lot of business owners tend to think when they first start the process will let people know that, you know, this Dunning-Kruger effect is happening. And as we move forward, as we understand better what your rights are and aren’t, you might start to lose confidence on some of this stuff.

 

So we circle back to this idea that hopefully we can help you get the registration. But even if that’s not helpful, this action that we’re taking is creating clarity for you and this knowledge that you’re using. Even if it’s bad news, it’s good to know it now and not receive a cease and desist letter in the future.

 

Okay, so give us your maybe this is not the right way to to ask the question. And so reframe it if I’m off base here. But what are maybe a couple of ways, 3 or 4 ways. Whatever the number is, the business owners can best protect themselves. Like or how do they become more knowledgeable in this area?

 

Yeah. I do have a resource that I can give you the link to if you’d like, Steve. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes for sure. And please tell us about it now. So we have a four part blog series called. I think it’s just like four trademark mistakes. Okay. And it walks people through the four biggest trademarks mistakes that people usually make.

 

And I’m going to disregard that. I said four because I don’t know if I’m going to get through all of them in the right order. But one of the biggest things that people have to learn is kind of what a trademark is and isn’t. And so a trademark is something, whether it’s a word or phrase, it can either be a sound or a smell, although that’s rare in business.

 

That when people see it, they think of your business. And so that is usually your business name. It could be a slogan, a logo, a product line, a podcast title, a course title. And so just to understand the trademarks have that broad definition. And it’s not just your business name. So, go kind of through the different branding elements that your business has and identify those different things.

 

Understand that there are two main layers of trademark rights. One is called common law trademark rights, which happen automatically. So as soon as you start using a trademark in commerce, as soon as you start using that brand in front of people, you own trademark rights automatically. But those automatic rights are super weak. They’re limited to your geographic region.

 

So smaller than your state and the only way to beef those rights up is to secure a U.S registration. You can also get state registrations, but that’s becoming a thing that less and less people are doing because the US registration gives you rights throughout the whole country. And so a registration is powerful because it gives you exclusive rights nationwide, not just to your specific trademark, but to anything that’s confusingly similar.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Using Tools To Search For Similar Names

 

So knowing that you can do a couple of things. One is to, you know, do your own Google search, think about that common law stuff, and just make sure that you’re using a name that isn’t very clearly being used by somebody already. Then you want to take a look at the free trademark database, which [email protected]. And it’s free.

 

It’s a search engine, kind of like Google, although it’s much, it’s much less tech friendly than Google. And so you can quickly and for free run a basic search, what I call a knock out search to see if you know the specific word or phrase that you want to use is taking or not. And you can kind of run similar searches, but eventually you want to run a more comprehensive search.

 

And when we do this for our clients, we actually invest in technology that runs more advanced searches for us just so that we can pick up things that are similar. So you want to make sure that there aren’t any very red flag situations because you want to do two things. You want to make sure that you’re not infringing on anybody else’s rights, and you want to make sure that you’re setting yourself up to register your own rights.

 

One of the biggest mistakes that we see people make is they think of a name. They go and they run that trademark search and they don’t see anything. And so they think that they’re good, and then they just stop on the trademark front. Oh, you mean they don’t carry that forward with a filing, right. Oh no. And that’s a huge risk because that search that you run has an immediate expiration date.

 

And so somebody could file for something a day after a couple of years later or whatever it is. And you may be able, if you have the money and resources and time to go after their application, try and argue that you were the first to use it. But it’s much more cost effective to just move forward on your own.

 

Well, that argument, you’re kind of on weak footing by making that argument, aren’t you? Yes. It’s very hard because the trademark registration is seen as evidence of your first use. And so if you don’t have that registration in place and you’re trying to argue that you used it at first, you have to come up with their own set of evidence and time stamps and witnesses and stuff like that to try and show that you were using it before they were right.

 

And it’s expensive to do that. Right? It is. And again, you know, when I first started, I was working with a lot of people in the Etsy space and newer business owners, okay. And, you know, saw that this was both a foundational thing that a business should care about, but also something that does cost money. So we have created a course around trademarks.

 

And the nice thing about it, we built it so that if you take the course, you should be able to move forward confidently. But if you take it and either decide that it’s too much work or for whatever reason, that you do want to hire our law firm, after all, you can let us know and we’ll discount the cost of that course off of our package.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Understanding Registration Filing Costs

 

Oh wow. Okay, so let me go back to my comment about the expensive piece, because I want to make sure that I’m not misunderstood there when I said that that could be expensive. As far as not doing it correctly the first time. Like do the search, carry that forward file for the trademark where it becomes a.

 

And not that there’s not a cost to that, but it’s small in comparison to having to gather evidence, having to work through a potential complaint, and how to work through a cease and desist. Right. That process is infinitely, I should say, infinitely, but it’s much more expensive than just doing it correctly, right? Absolutely, absolutely. People usually tend to ask me like, well, what should I do here?

 

Or like, what’s the legal answer? And you could legally be on solid ground, but if it’s going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars to prove that you’re on solid ground, that’s not a good business strategy. No. Wow. Okay, so I kind of interrupted you there. Did that cover all of the blog post topics, the mistakes that you’re covering?

 

Yeah, yeah. And just to give your listeners a little bit more clarity and understanding on the cost of filing that registration. Okay. There are filing fees that go to the trademark office that are at least $200 when you apply. And that’s you can do it on your own. But most of the applications that fail, which again, is over half of them, are done without an attorney.

 

And, there are opportunities like legalzoom and stuff that you can use. But me and my lawyer friends, we are cleaning up legalzoom messes. Currently, Stephen. And I’ll be honest with you, if we get to a time where I do think confidently that those types of services can do this well, I’ll be the first attorney to promote it, because I don’t think that this is something that business owners should be priced out of being able to do.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: It’s Best to Work With An Expert On This Matter

 

The problem right now with that stuff, though, is that Legalzoom is essentially a form filling service, right? They’re not really reviewing and analyzing the situation and what you’re sending. So it often turns into garbage in, garbage out. Well, and I remember the process of working with Sharon and we did this closely over months and months and months and months.

 

If I remember correctly, I think it was about an 18 month process. It could be a little bit that could be a little bit strong there. But, I remember the initial filing provided all the documentation, the use of evidence and or evidence of use and all of that. And then there was the back and forth with the USPTO like, well, we need this and we need that.

 

We need additional explanation here. It was a tedious process. And when I think about it now, I’m like there’s, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do that on my own. I love the fact that you have created a course and provided that option. And to teach in full transparency. That is awesome. But then when I think about having gone through that process, working with an expert is just so much better.

 

You know, because you could get to rely on their expertise and there’s nuance, as you well know. And I’m always concerned about making a mistake. And so onward like if you’re to go down this process is like seeking out an expert who specializes in this and really knows what they’re doing. Yeah, I mean, I kind of compare it to bookkeeping.

 

And I quickly learned that I should, you know, I know that I have a very low ceiling in my understanding in that department, so I found someone to help me there as quickly as I could in business. And yeah, there’s definitely a cost to doing this stuff on your own, even if it ends up being successful.

 

Oh, yes. I know that we’re getting compressed on time here. But before we go, Joey, and before we wrap up close out, say goodbye. Any final advice that you want to share and anything you think we might have missed? Maybe. And then. And then please tell onward business owners the best way to connect with you.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: Final Advice from Joey

 

Oh. Thank you. So we covered a lot, and I’m just trying to kind of go through my mental Rolodex of things that I usually talk about. Oh, I’ll say this. Okay. And this is something that we’re seeing recently is in the same way that entrepreneurs are going after people who use their stuff. A more understanding situation is what we’re now seeing is a lot of educators who are educating on one particular platform, creating some type of a course or membership around that platform.

 

So, for instance, Pinterest experts, Instagram, experts, Facebook ad experts, and what those platforms are starting to do, they don’t care too much about you creating some type, of course, around improving an on their platform, but they do not like it when you name your course, you know entrepreneurs guide to Pinterest. Got it. Like how to like Facebook’s guide to whatever.

 

Yes. And so in the same way that entrepreneurs going after entrepreneur related podcasts, we’re seeing Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and others, I think in a much more understanding situation, going after those educators saying, we’re not asking you to take this down, but you can’t use our name in the title. Oh, interesting. So, like, if you’re a Facebook expert, what do you and you’re trying to teach people on how to market and promote themselves on Facebook.

 

What do you do if you can’t use Facebook in the title of your expert or whatever material you’re publishing so you can’t get creative? And I’ll give you one really good example. Okay. My friend Tyler McCall is an Instagram expert, okay? And he’s got a membership all about Instagram. And actually creating a business and making sales off of Instagram.

 

And so the name of his membership is Follower to Fan Society. And then and then if that’s intriguing in some reads a description, then in the description he talks that it’s all about Instagram, that that would be appropriate then. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s really great specifically in those instances. But really for any business to think about a suggestive business name or course title or whatever it is.

 

So if you follow the fan society, you might not know what it is that they do. But as soon as you connect the dots between that being the name and it being about Instagram, you start to fill that with meaning and understanding for sure. And it’s great because Tyler was able to really take one of his like, key takeaways and, and philosophies on what success means on that platform and bake it into the name of his membership.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first

 

Register Your Trademark: How to Connect with Joey

 

Love it. What is the best way for Onward Nation business owners to connect with you, Joey? Well, if you are on Instagram, you speaking of Instagram, you can follow me at Joey C Vitale there. On Facebook you can find me under my name or under Indie Law. And you can also just go to IndieLaw.com for more trademark help.

 

Okay, Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and re-listen to Joey’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. Please take what he so generously shared with you. All of the mistakes, all of the insight, all of the case studies, everything that is happening in the press today.

 

Take this depth of knowledge again that he so generously shared with you and gave to you. Take it, apply it into your business right away and accelerate your results and protect your business going forward. Based on what he shared with you and Joey, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day as my friend, and I am grateful that you said yes.

 

I am grateful to our mutual friend Craig Cody. Craig, if you’re listening. Thank you, my friend, so that you could come on to the show today and be our mentor and guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, Joey. Thank Stephen for having me. And thank you, Onward Nation. 

 

This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

Are you planning to register your trademark? Know the basics first