Elaine, an online entrepreneur, just sold another piece of bead jewelry. This last sale was worth at least $20. The order came as a message on her website. The confirmation was sent through by cell phone text message. A bank deposit payment was made by the buyer and she shipped the item by courier.

Compared to Amazon.com and other large online stores, it is a crude way to conduct e-commerce. But it works for her and she gets more than 40% profit for each sale.

She is like many others who have learned to sell their products through multiply.com. She explains that her friends laughed at the idea at first. When she started getting orders through her website, she realized it was really worth pursuing. Marketing through social networking sites, at least on multiply, apparently work!

How does that work? Multiply, like Friendster, is a social networking website. It has some features like blogging and a photo gallery. When visitors drop by a website in Multiply, those with multiply accounts can invite the website’s owner. Once within the invitee’s network, the website owner is able to see all their existing contacts. When she updates her website, everybody in the contact list is notified.

As Elaine sells items and updates the images on your website, everybody in her entire network is informed about it. The curious are enticed to drop by and see what products are for sale. That’s free marketing for her!

More important, she can also see which visitors dropped by her website (similar to the mybloglog plugin). When she clicks on an visitor avatar, she can see their website, their contacts and photos. She can then again invite the new contacts and automatically add them to her network. The network grows larger and the potential customer base increases! It’s a virtually self propagating marketing system.

Elaine is happy about it and is now planning to offer PayPal and other more payment options. “It’s going to be worth it.” she says as she uploads another bead jewelry image on her site.

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