What Happens After Trademark Registration
If you have a registered trademark, you have to listen up!
Your brand name is near and dear to your heart, you've gone the extra mile, you've registered your trademark, awesome. However, it’s not over yet…
Monitor Your Trademark
The first thing that you want to be sure to do is to monitor your trademark and by that I mean, at the very least set up a Google Alert of your brand name or a similar brand name. Anytime Google finds something, some mention of that name on the internet, you will get an email. It might sometimes be your own brand that you are emailed about. It might also be an infringer, so it's good to keep on top of other uses of your trademark. There are also attorneys that do monitoring and software that does trademark monitoring, so you can work with one of them as well.
Renew Your Trademark
Next, you should know that there are renewals at play here. You have to renew a registered trademark starting from the date it's registered between the 5th and 6th year, and then between the 9th and 10th year. So if it's registered January 1, then you count 5 years from that. And you also count 9 years from that. And those 2 one year windows are when you need to renew your trademark registration.
Enforce Your Trademark
Finally, the last one is enforce. If you find out someone is encroaching or infringing on your brand name, you have to enforce it. If you don't enforce your rights, you can lose your rights, because then someone else can use it and someone else can use it and then you have 10 people using your brand name and your rights are gone. They're just nothing. So you do have to enforce your rights in order to keep your trademark rights so that they don't dissolve!