Well, I shouldn’t say that you’ll be selling nothing, but one of the fastest emerging trends in e-commerce is to sell virtual goods. As you can imagine, selling virtual goods can be quite lucrative because you will never run out of inventory, you don’t need a physical warehouse to store your goods, and the entire sales process can be fully automated with no human intervention whatsoever.

Take Facebook, for example. If you’ve got an account on that social networking site, you’ll notice that there is a daily gift available for sale for $1. All that is involved is a very small image file that you can “send” to one of your friends and it shows up under their list of gifts received. It costs Facebook virtually nothing to create this gift, but if you look around at people’s profiles, you’ll find a few gifts scattered about. Imagine how much they’re making! And then there are third-party Facebook applications that can be easily monetized for more money.

A similar phenomenon happens over at Second Life, but according to ABC News, making money in Second Life is harder than you think. Within the virtual world of Second Life, people can exchange real money for virtual goods like a virtual plot of land, a commodity, or just about anything that you could buy in the real world. In talking with my friend Ed Lau, he told me that he was once offered a plot of virtual land in the Second Life and this was way before the “simulation game” really took off. He respectfully declined. John Chow was made the same offer and he also declined. Imagine how much money they could have made!

It goes to show you, when it comes to selling things online, these products need not physically exist for them to be lucrative. Think outside the box and you could be the next Internet millionaire.