As a follow up to the last blog entry, here is a video showing you how to create extremely secure passwords for your websites. 

Click To Watch Secure Passwords Video

To find out how secure your current passwords are, click here. 

Refreshed and ready, you sit down at your computer to do a little more work on your websites. 

You've worked hard on those websites for a year and you're very proud of them. They provide you a nice passive income of $10,000 each month allowing you to quit your job and sleep in until 11am on Monday mornings.

You go to your website login page. Something is wrong…

1) You can't log in to your control panel.

2) Your login page is all messed up.

3)  Your main website is gone.

With a growing sense of horror you realize that someone has broken into your website and destroyed most of your work for the last year!

Sounds like a horrible situation, doesn't it?  And yet this exact situation happens to hundreds (thousands?) of website owners every day.  It could just as easily happen to you if…

You Are Using Weak And Insecure Passwords To Protect Your Livelihood. 

Think about it.

Your website control panel password is the only thing stopping someone having control of your entire website. 

Once they're in they can steal your work or destroy it at their whim.

So why don't we discover just how secure your passwords are?

Click Here to open a password strength checker in a new window.  

Once it's open, try typing your passwords in and see what rating you get. 

I guarantee that 98% of the readers on this blog will discover their passwords are rated "weak" or "medium". 

IMPORTANT:  If you have concerns about typing your passwords into a web page you are very wise!  Please note that none of your passwords are stored in any way on this page - the javascript code on this page displays a result to you only.  I encourage you to look at the source code to verify this.

So What Does This Mean For You? 

If your passwords are reated as "weak" or "medium" strength then you are in danger of having your websites destroyed or stolen at some point. This is particularly true if your website becomes successful and well known. 

Here's how it will happen…

One of the many thousands of "Bad Guys" on the internet will target your website with a "brute force password script".

This script is a small peice of software that will try to log into your control panel or other log in pages as much as 400 times a second. Each time the script tries to log in it will use a new password. 

These brute force scripts tend to start by going through dictionary words and adding some numbers or letters on the end because that's what most people do to create a password - create something really easy to type and easy to remember.

Now at 400 "guesses" a second, that script can try over 34.5 million passwords each day.

How long do you think your password will last if that script is running against your site for a week?

Here's How To Beat The Bad Guys

So you've realized your passwords are insecure and you want to do something about it.  Here are some tips:

Some examples might be:

g!IE7dp00UY

908jf4e3#UF3

h&yT$32Up

With passwords like these you are increasing your online security massively.

Yes, they are much harder to remember and this is a good thing.  

If you have trouble remembering you can create some rules to help you. 

For example, pick a song lyric and use the first letter of each word to help build the password by adding numbers or punctuation between each line of the lyric. 

For example, let's pick a song randomly - "Desert Rose" by Sting.

If the lyrics are:

Your password could be: "Tdr1Eohv,asp2"

If you know the lyrics you can remember this extremely secure password easily and yet nobody else will have a clue.  

But Here's The Challenging Part…

You really need a different secure password for each key website you own.

You should also have a separate password for every critical website you have access to such as banks, paypal, your domain registrar etc. Again, you may have rules that help you.

For example, you might add an additional code to each of your websites that goes before the password.

So for PayPal it might be: PP6!Tdr1Eohv,asp2

For ClickBank it might be: CB9!Tdr1Eohv,asp2

Where PP6 is the first letter of each syllable in the domain name (PayPal = PP) and 6 is the number of letters.

ClickBank = CB + 9 letters = CB9 

Now I know all of this is probably is probably giving you a migraine, but it really is quite simple to set up even though it seems complex.

With a few simple rules your websites can be super secure with passwords impossible for others to guess.

What you have to ask yourself is this… 

What will it cost me to lose everything? To have my PayPal password stolen? To have my domain names stolen and transferred to a new owner?

The "cost" of spending a couple of hours creating and remembering some rules to create secure passwords is well worth the risk of losing all the hard work you've been doing online.

Think about it and leave me your thoughts in the comments.