You've probably heard the entire rave about Twitter recently, not to mention Facebook and MySpace. But did you know you can utilize these platforms to reach more people which will increase sales for your work at home business?

You may or may not know, but there are literally millions of people on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Combined there are probably billions of people. Those people are your potential customers or at least they may be a link to your potential customers.

The idea behind each of these social networking sites is to connect your friends to your friend's friends and their friend's friends to more friends. Get it? And while MySpace and Facebook may be geared more toward building friendships, they can also be used to build your business, whether it's online or not. Here's how it works.

You have a website for your business and hopefully a business blog. You write a blog post about a special deal, a new product or a service. That's good. Search engines like sites that are updated regularly and put them higher in the ranks than static sites.

Now, suppose you announce that new blog post on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites? Think of all the potential people that will see the link to your blog post and click on it. How many more people will see it and act? The potential is millions.

"They" say social network marketing IS becoming THE way to market online and there are hundreds of different social networking platforms you can choose from. Obviously you probably won't ever know about all of them, nor would you be able to keep up with them all.

The three mentioned above are the most popular and if you don't belong to at least one of them, preferably two, you're missing the potential to reach millions of people. You definitely need to be on Twitter and either Facebook or MySpace.

More about Twitter:

With Twitter alone, you have the potential to reach more people on the Internet than ever with your business. Right now there are an estimated 6 million people registered on Twitter. That number is expected to rise even higher in the next year, to over 18 million people!

When you post a "tweet" on Twitter, not only do your followers see it, often they "re-tweet" your tweet which goes out to their followers and their followers re-tweet to their followers. So, you want to make your tweets worth re-tweeting. Does all this tweeting make any sense yet? It will once you're on Twitter.

If you haven't joined yet, I urge you to do so now and start building friendships with fellow Tweeters. And don't just tweet about business. Build relationships with others who are in the same line of business, and build true friendships with some of your followers.

If you don't have time to market your business using social networking, hire a social networking manager. They will do all your social network marketing for you as your representative. This can be worked many different ways, and your social networking manager will give you some ideas of how it can and should be done the best way for your business.

It will be well worth the cost of hiring a social networking manager as you'll soon be reaping the benefits of added traffic to your sites and more traffic means more sales.

Other popular social networking platforms are LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Kirtsy (for women's sites), Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

If your offline business doesn't have a website, get one now. You're missing out on literally millions of potential customers.