You have probably heard that you shouldn’t use the same password on different sites and that your password should be made up of a combination of letters and numbers.

Even though we know those things, a lot of us still use really bad passwords, like the names of our kids, our pets or words like “dragon” and “mustang”. In fact, the most common passwords in the world are “123456″ and “password”.

If you use the same password on every site and an intruder finds out your password, he has access to all the sites you use. Everything from your bank account to personal photos and email could be at risk.

So if we know that it’s not a good idea to use those simple passwords, why do we keep doing it? We do it because it’s convenient. A simple password is easy to remember.

But here’s the secret, a good password can also be very easy to remember.
Let me show you.

Creating a smart password

The trick is to create a password built on both static parts and variables based on the domain of the website you are creating a password for.

1. Start by coming up with a set of random letters and numbers
For this example, let’s say “e6” and “43M“. These static parts will be the base of your new password system.

We are going to use parts of the domain name to complete the password. Let’s say we are creating a password to log in to Facebook.com.

2. Take the first two letters in the site’s name
“fa”, from “facebook”, this is our first variable. For all our passwords, we will know to start with the first two letters of the domain name.

3. Then we add our first static part of the password
That is “e6“, so we’ve got “fae6“.

4. Now we take the last two letters in the name of the site
In this case “ok” from “facebook”. We add that to the end of our password – “fae6ok“.

5. Append our last static numbers and letters to the password
We add “43M” and end up with “fae6ok43M” as our password for Facebook.

Now all you have to do to remember your unique passwords for thousands of websites is to remember the few letters and numbers you came up with at the start, in this case e6 and 43M, and then look at the domain name of the site you are logging in to.

When we want to login to say YouTube.com, the system makes it easy.

This is just one simplified example. You can use whatever combination of static letters and numbers + variables from the domain name as you like, the more you mix it up, the better. The important thing is that you decide on a system and start using it on all websites you use. Then you will have a different password for every site, but they will be very easy to remember and best of all, your data is a bit safer.