Marshall Brain has a great article on making money on the internet: http://webkew.blogspot.com/2005/04/welcome-to-webkew.html. He is author of the extremely popular site: How Stuff Works.
Since you are probably going to have more success at becoming financially free by having your own business and multiple sources of passive income, than working in a regular 9-5 job, the internet abounds with opportunities.
Also, you can continue working in your regular job while you wait to build up the business. The process is slow and time consuming, but the great thing is that you can go and vacation for two weeks and the cheques still roll in.
If your site is moderately successful and you keep working on it, growth tends to be exponential as you get more and more readers, links, advertisers and so on.
