When considering new names for a business, or for new products or services – or even when filing to protect a existing name – it is always a good idea to review your domain names first.
Once an application is filed with the USPTO, the information is publicly available. Someone, or some computer crawler, may find the new brand name within a matter of hours or days and register any corresponding domain names. They do this because you may want the domain names in the future. And it may be easier to pay them rather than to fight them. Or it may be difficult to challenge their ownership of the domain name(s) if they are not really in use. And if even if do not use the domain names, you won’t have to worry about the risk of someone else using them.
You should register the domains first – before filing with the USPTO – to block them (at least the .com’s but maybe others too). Even if you are unlikely to ever want to use the domain names, the cost of registering them – a few dollars a year – far outweighs the costs of buying them from someone else, filing a dispute against someone else, or losing web traffic to someone else.
Bonus Tip: if applicable, also register the corresponding social media usernames for Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. if only to make sure that no one else uses them.
