At the last count Facebook had something like 500 Million users worldwide the majority of whom live in the USA. This social site is rapidly becoming Google's biggest rival with Facebook advertising getting ready to take a lot of business away from Google Adwords. Because of this Facebook has become too big for any serious legitimate online business marketer to ignore but I am pretty sure that many of the work from home internet marketers have not yet taken the time to even think about Facebook as a tool to add to their marketing strategy.

Many of these marketers still think of Facebook as an opportunity to link up online with family and friends and share photographs and news, and they feel uncomfortable using this same medium to promote their legitimate online businesses.

Although a solution to this dilemma may be to simply create a separate account for your business, this is unfortunately not possible as Facebook forbids anybody from having more than one account.

So how can you possibly solve this problem and tap into the massive amount of traffic that is available on Facebook if you don't want to invest in placing ads and you also don't want to mix all your personal stuff with your business messages and news feeds?

One way to solve the problem is to make use of Facebook pages. You can use a Facebook page to promote a particular service or product and this can be done through your Facebook account. Once it is all set up then all you need to do is invite other Facebook users to come and view it and if they like it they can become "fans' of your page.

Fans differ from friends as they will not show up on your main Facebook site, but any news from pages where you may have become a fan yourself will show up in your newsfeed.

It is fairly simple to set up a series of Facebook pages for a few of your products and this is a means to keep your Facebook traffic segmented into the different audience groups and keep your business activities separate from your social ones.

There are a number of applications that you can use, for example you can post photos, videos and text to your page and all of this will provide great link juice to your blogs or web pages. Likewise you can utilize your blogs for publicizing your Facebook fan pages.

When it comes to the type of fan pages that do well on Facebook this very much depends on the amount of effort you put in to it but one point to keep in mind is that the leading demographic profile on Facebook is the "young educated women" bracket. A good idea would be to source a product or service that will compliment this niche and you might hit a winning streak.

It is really simple to set up Facebook pages and the good thing is that there is zero cost involved. This is an excellent method to use for adding more awareness to your legitimate online businesses, so take another look at Facebook and make it part of your advertising campaign.