Managing Multiple Website Passwords

Managing Online Accounts

As an online marketer, one major aspect of managing your business is password and account management.

Typically you will have multiple accounts for sites like YouTube, Google, Twitter etc, not to mention all the article directories and bookmarking sites.   It is vital to be able to quickly and easily login to all these various sites, as this can speed up the more tedious aspects of online marketing.

The question is how can you effectively and securely manage all those accounts?

Well, like a lot of people, you can rely on the password management features that are built into your browser.

This is how most people start off, but it doesn’t take too long to be frustrated by the limitations it imposes:

• Passwords are stored unencrypted on your computer, which makes them very vulnerable to hackers or rogue software.
• No easy support for multiple accounts for a particular site.
• No easy management of the account information, eg: editing, deleting details.
• Password functionality is limited to the browser, ie: you can’t open another browser and access the same account/password information.

Password Manager Options

There are certainly plenty of password managers that you can use.  One name that comes up a lot is RoboForm.  RoboForm is a good product, but the free version is very limited in functionality, that you really do need to purchase the Pro version which is $29.95

Being the cheapskate that I am, I went hunting around for other products that would offer the same functionality, but for free.  After a lot of reading, I narrowed it down to two options:

1. Sxipper
2. LastPass

In the end, I decided to go with LastPass.  The main reason for this, was that LastPass supports all major browsers, ie: FireFox, IE, Safari, Chrome etc.  LastPass also has better form management compared to Sxipper.

The LastPass  free version is fully featured, however there is a Premium version which costs $1 per month.  The main additional functionality in the premium version is support for mobile devices like iPhone, Blackberry etc.