dunno about marketing your own stuff, but i do know one way to earn money
a friend of mine was launching his consulting service for chinese international students, so he tried marketing on weibo
apparently, if you want someone with a lot of followers to "retweet" (dunno what it's called for weibo, but same function) your posts, you can pay them to do it, and it's not cheap (the price my friend heard was like $300 USD)
so i guess if you want to earn money, you have to first have enough followers, then do commercials for other ppl
i'm sure there are other ways, but agree that it's better to first understand how their e-commerce system works