As you get further and further involved in affiliating with partner businesses, one change you will notice in your life is the number of forms you have to fill and the number of passwords which you will need to remember.
Practically every business partner which you will want to affiliate with will have a special requirement for information about you. That's reasonable, because if they don't know who you are and a few details about you how are they going to be able to pay you for the customers you send to them.
The result of this is that you will be required to provide passwords and fill in more forms than you have ever experienced before in your life. Not only that, you will need to remember the details of most of these forms and certainly you will need to remember those passwords if you want to track you commission earnings and payments.
Two basic approaches to passwords.
One is to invent a single password which you can easily remember but which will be very difficult or impossible for someone to guess or stumble on by chance. This one password would be used whenever you need a password.
The great weakness of this approach is that is can be very insecure. All it takes is someone at Point A who requests your password, to remember it and try it at Account B, if they want to try to get access to that account.
So, a much more secure approach is to have a different password for each account or place where you need a password or PIN number. (A PIN number is simply a numerical form of a password.)
The problem you're faced with in this situation is how to remember each password when you may have dozens or even hundreds to remember.
Inventing Unique passwords.
If your need is for just a small number of passwords which you can remember easily here's an approach that seems to work well for many people.
| Make up some kind of ridiculous statement about yourself or someone or something close and dear to you. Make sure that this statement includes some kind of number. |
For example you might come up with something like: - "My dog has fourteen fleas on its third eyebrow." or,
- "Uncle Oscar ate nine flowers and dyed his hair purple."
The vital thing about these statements is that YOU invent them and they mean something to you. This makes them EASY to remember.
| Now that you have your statements, make up a rule for yourself about how you are going to take that statement and turn it into a password. |
One rule might be:
- Use the first letter of each word, and if the word is a number, use the first digit of the number.
This rule would turn the first example above into the following password:
mdh1foi3e.
The second example would produce:
uoa9fadhhp.
If you changed your rule to:
-
Use the second letter of each word and the last digit of any number,
we'd come up with the following passwords:
yoa4lnt3y
and
nst9lnyiau.
The beauty of this system is that you could actually write down the sentences in some place and as long as no one knew how you were interpreting them (the rules you invented) they would be quite secure.
Another system
Another system, more complex, which you can write down but will probably not find easy to remember is to use a book such as a favorite novel, as a key.
I have a book in mind which I'd identify as TSP, so I can write down a password key such as
TSP59x7.
What does this tell me? Look on page 59 on the book I know as TSP and take out 7 letters.
What letters? Again, this depends on a rule which I make up. For example, I might decide to use the first letters of each line, or the third letter of each line.
Make up your own rule, then no one will easily be able to decipher your key.
The main advantage of this system is that you can openly keep a record of your accounts and the password keys and it will be next to impossible for anyone to discover your passwords unless they discover what book you're using as a key.
In your case, you might use a book which is soooo obvious to you that you don't even have to use the initials of the book to remind you which one it is. Just make sure that it's one which ISN'T obvious to other people!
How to Remember them All
Even with systems like this form filling, and then looking up and remembering passwords can be a major chore.
To make this a snap, I use a tool called ROBO FORM
This stores all your information on your own computer and automatically remembers which password to use when you browse to a specific web site.
It can fill in virtually all forms which you'll find on the net with your personal information if you record it previously.
And it will keep a record of all this information securely on your own system, if you wish.
There's a modest cost to register the program, but you can download it for Free, and use it for a while without any cost and WITHOUT advertising.
I discovered and switched to RoboForm because I had been using an ad supported program which surreptitiously loaded spy ware onto my system.
You can find out more about ROBO FORM here.
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