How do i get a patent?

There are really only two good approaches: Either you hire a patent attorney to file the application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or you do it yourself. A good patent attorney will cost you about $5000 to $10,000. There are books available to walk you through the process if you choose to do it yourself. Watch out for companies that claim they help inventors, they will take your money and just give you publicly available information about the Patent and Trademark office.

"A U.S. patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor(s), issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. To get a U.S. patent, an application must be filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."

Check out this link:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/howtopat.htm

There is one approach that is best of all. File a provisional patent application (as little as $110). In many cases you can file it yourself. Use a book like From Patent to Profit or The Patent Writer. Or use the software Patent Wizard, which is very inexpensive at www.frompatenttoprofit.com. A provisional patent application gives you legal patent pending rights and may preserve worldwide filing rights providing your invention was not publicly disclosed prior to filing the application. During that year, you can try to commercialize your invention and see if you can make money on it. Spend the $5-10,000 on marketing and making money instead wasting it on legal fees on an innovation that may not sell.