Facebook is a serious money machine. Getting Facebook traffic to money making offers has been the goldmine eluding most marketers. Only those who learn the mechanics of Facebook truly understand how to use its power. So, how do you crack the code?

Facebook's current rate of expansion is mind boggling. By the end of 2007, daily signups were over 100,000 and the site was expanding at a super-charged rate of 3% per week according to the latest statistics presented by the company Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

You'll be pleased to know, from a marketing perspective, Zuckerberg also claims that the fastest growing demographic group of new Facebook users is in the over 25 years of age group. This would suggest a 'maturing' of the Facebook community, and the beginnings of a move away from the original bias towards those with a college and high school background. This has proved to be a lucrative demographic for marketers!

Indeed, over 60% of registered Facebook users are now non-college students, and that figure is expected to increase to over 75% (that will be 50 million users) in the next six months. Non-college students spend money in greater numbers on the web that the so-called highly educated. This is money in the bank for marketers who can see Facebook with different eyes.

Facebook is currently attracting 70 billion page views per month, and was the sixth most trafficked website in the USA, having recently surpassed eBay, and is now rapidly closing in on Google's traffic figures. This kind of traffic adds up to a major marketing field for marketers who know how to social network.

You also need to see this as a global marketplace. Facebook is not quite so focused on the USA as it once was. Today, over 10% of Canadians are Facebook account holders with similar levels in the UK.

If you then add in the fact that Microsoft paid 240 million US dollars for a 1.6% stake in FaceBook (which values the company at around $15 billion in total) you clearly have a picture of a company and a social networking model that is going places very quickly indeed.

It is clear that Facebook is a website and social community that is enjoying phenomenal levels of growth from what was a relatively closeted and deeply specialized background. These numbers would also clearly indicate that Facebook could represent a potentially huge marketplace for any business or organization that can create means of advertising that are effective with the site members.

Many marketers who used MySpace to pad their bank accounts, and still do, have tried and failed to duplicate their success on Facebook. The reason? They tried a cookie-cutter approach to reach Facebook users. In other words, they reasoned, MySpace and Facebook are both social networking sites so why not use the same tactics for both? This is wrong thinking because the members of each site are different in social makeup and need to be wooed differently.

Let's look at just one of the advertising options that is free within the FaceBook community site.

"Pages"

Creating a 'Page' costs nothing and allows you to create a one page mini-site about your business. It is essentially a full one page advert for your business.

When you first visit the 'Pages' page, you will immediately see that there are three drop down menu boxes at the top of the page. The first of these boxes is for listing a home grown business based locally. The drop down shows all of the different types of business that you can list, such as, Automotive, Banking, Café, Grocery etc. There are many to choose from.

The next drop down lists businesses by product or service. You'll want to focus on this. This is where you likely will focus your marketing efforts.

One of the categories that should meet your needs in this second 'drop down' is 'Online Store' . This is the category in which most smart internet marketers are promoting their services! Remember that this is a free advertising tool, so it will certainly merit making a little bit of effort to take advantage of this resource.

I not only recommend that you exploit this category listing, and create your own page, but that you build it with as 'passive' a voice as you can. In other words, don't hard sell simply because you will not outsmart FaceBook veterans. Instead, do try to make your online store a place that is entertaining enough to entice visitors in, rather than shouting at them that they must visit you. Shout and they will flag you as a spammer!

So, make your page as interesting, engaging and exciting as possible. You can do this by adding extra 'applications' to your Page. Add things like videos, pictures, flash content, reviews and so on. Make your page stand apart from others in your niche but use common sense and good design.

As FaceBook expands there has never been a better time to start building your page than right now. What are you waiting for? You should take action immediately!