Affiliate marketing as a way to make money online?

I'm an information junkie. I don't buy a tube of lipstick without researching it online. Every product that has ever touched my son has been expertly picked out, this stay at home doesn't mess around. Any little thing that gets my attention gets Googled. Its just the way I am, I have to know things, I call it being informative, my husband calls it being nosy. That being said, I'm not going to jump into this whole work from home making money online thing without a bit of research. Actually, a lot of research. I've been reading about how to work from home for quite a while and now I'm trying to just make sense of it all. It seems like there are so many ways to go about making money online. There are so many terms swimming around my head right now, blog, niche, monetize, search engine optimization, RSS, backlinking, adsense, affiliate marketing. . . its enough to make any stay at home mom go crazy! I have a basic understanding of how things work in the blogosphere, but when you're trying to make some real money online, then basic is not gonna cut it. I have to really educate myself on these things. Fortunately, I've never been the type to be scared of some reading. If nothing else, at least I'll be a little more interesting throwing some terms around at a cocktail party. My homework now is to focus on specific topics to learn more about it.

My first subject of choice is Affiliate Marketing. Is this the way to go to make money online? I picked up Affiliate Millions by Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden to find out. The author Anthony Borelli is a multi-millionaire from Affiliate Marketing and he has written this book to tell us wannabes how he did it. Granted, he did hit while the market was hot, but like I said, it certainly doesn't hurt to find out some of his secrets. So anyways, this guy claims that the way to make lots of money online is through Affiliate Marketing. He says that there are several ways to conduct affiliate advertising activities online, through personal and business web sites or blogs, e-publications, and search marketing, specifically, paid search marketing-which is his method of choice. You know how when you Google something and a list of paid sponsors comes up on the right? That's paid search marketing, and apparently this book will show us all how to make millions from this specific method. Now I'm not that far into this book yet, but from my understanding, going about making money online with this method requires you to invest some of your own money online. I'm not so sure about this. Not only do I think investing money online is risky, but I don't even have enough money to invest. The book is well written though and easy to follow, so I will continue to read it, maybe it will take me one step further to being a work at home mom.