No, blogs (Wordpress) are for getting Google traffic to you so you can get clicks through to your offers. ;)
Basic overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization
Where I generally find products to promote (they usually come with banners, pre-made landing pages, etc.):
http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
Recommended forums:
http://blackhatworld.com
http://www.warriorforum.com
http://forums.digitalpoint.com
99.99% of the stuff people are trying to sell on those forums is crap, but there's lots of general information there that's very good. BHW's "Making Money" section has a tonne of stickied topics under each subsection with good info.
The advantage of having web dev/sysadmin skills is that you can take a method people are running manually (and probably even example code that's floating around) and scale it easily to 100x what they're doing. You don't have to innovate, you just have to automate and scale.
Be careful if you use shady methods. If the product owner realises what you're doing, they'll kill your account and refuse to pay the middleman who will refuse to pay you. :)
If you meet/befriend other people in IM and establish that you're not a noob, doors will be opened to better offers/products and better terms for payment e.g., being paid three days after the end of the week ("net 3") instead of seven days ("net 7").
You can get $75 USD free credit when you register on Adwords (http://adwords.google.com). After a few days, you'll be able to decrease your bids on keywords to $0.01, so $75 = 7,500 people clicking through to your landing page/offer. Unless your conversion rate is atrocious, you'll make back far more than $75. This isn't a bad place to start experimenting. SEO works, too, but it's more of a "long haul" thing. PPC advertising gets you traffic right now, but you have to be careful that it doesn't annihilate your profit margins.