How to Best Share Your Passwords with Your Virtual Assistants

by Francis
(October 09, 2012)

When you have an online business and you work with a virtual assistant, it will be necessary at some point in time that you share your online passwords with them. Of course, don’t share your bank account or if the VA doesn’t need it – your personal email password.

Although I know that famous authors like Tim Ferriss have outsourced their emails completely, personally, I like to keep my personal email account for me. However for many other tasks, you might want to share your passwords with your virtual assistants.

For that, change it first if you have the bad habit of using the same password everywhere. It’s a good first step to changing this habit anyway.

How to keep track of all those changed passwords?

If you try to remember them or write them down on little bits of paper, stop.

You’ll forget them, mix them up or lose your paper.

There is a free tool I like to use which encrypts all my passwords in one place and I remember one main password which is extremely important in order for me to keep track of all other passwords. This tool is called LastPass.

What this tool does is that it retrieves all the passwords you have used so far which might be saved in your browser in one safe place. Then it deletes them all from your browser.

In order to get access to your passwords, you will need to login into your LastPass account. Fortunately, this can be accessed from anywhere even mobile. So don’t worry about forgetting your passwords.

It’s still useful to remember the most important passwords manually. Also, I don’t save my bank account passcode anywhere. This one I know by heart.

What does it all have to do with Virtual Assistants?

Well, a VA can help you with managing your social media. I share my password from my Twitter account, my StumbleUpon account and of my content management system, the Site-builder platform, with my virtual assistant.

This means I have changed it before, saved the change into my LastPass account and now my virtual assistant cannot access to it. If at some point in time I need to change it again, for example if I work with another virtual assistant, I will do so LastPass will save the password for me and the access will be for me alone again.

Actually, LastPass goes further than saving your passwords; it generates and encrypts passwords which you don’t need to remember in one place for you. That’s a good service if you have a hard time coming up with passwords.

Anyways if you share any access with your virtual assistant, think about how you manage all the passwords. They are important, you know?

Do you have any tips of how you deal with your passwords?

Would you trust your VA with your personal passwords?

And if not, what would it take?

Please be sure to share your thoughts and comments.

Comments for How to Best Share Your Passwords with Your Virtual Assistants

Mar 07, 2014	LastPass: Highly Recommended! by: DeineI use LastPass for my social media accounts and for work, too, and I must say that it really is very very useful! I don’t have to remember passwords anymore — which I’m prone to forgetting. Waah! I recommend it to anyone who haven’t tried it yet. It only takes a couple of minutes to download and install. It’s just great! 😀
Jul 15, 2014	Entrepreneur’s must-have tool by: JohnThis is truly an amazing tool that every entrepreneurs online must have. It will make things easier for you since you only need to remember one password to gain access to all your virtual offices 😀
Sep 05, 2014	Change Password Frequently with Your VA by: FrancisLastPass is a great tool for anyone who’s online, anyways. Especially with all the different cases of passwords being hacked and stuff like that. You wouldn’t believe that passwords like the word “PASSWORD” are the most popular passwords out there. Other combinations are “123456” or something like that. It’s ridiculous.With LastPass, at least you have some very strong and very unique passwords at your reach. The best thing is that you don’t have to remember them. The only bad thing is that you definitively need LastPass for your online life to work well. In combination with the virtual assistant, LastPass is best used like that. You create a new set of passwords for all the services you want to share with your virtual assistants. Then your virtual assistant installs LastPass for himself. You share the services that your virtual assistant should have access to. Your VA uses LastPass to save his passwords that he received from you. When you update a password, you just send him the information. He changes it in LastPass and doesn’t need to remember anything except for having his plugin from LastPass in the browser up to date, of course. All in all, a very safe method where I can really give two thumbs up with all of my heart.