This was posted on Slashdot earlier today, and most of the answers haven't been particularly insightful.

Quote"I'm a stay-at-home mom, but I'd like to be a work-at-home mom. I've done a few writing gigs, but I'm not a really good writer and cannot charge the fees needed for it to be worth my time. I'm just looking for something that I can teach myself in a few months and start taking small projects and working my way up from there. I've found that PHP, HTML and CSS to be the most demanded skills on sites like Elance, but the talent pool is flooded with overseas workers and Americans with so much more experience than me. Even when I was offering writing and virtual admin services on Elance I was having a hard time against them. So I'm asking here, because I think most of you may have a good insight on this type of thing as an employer of freelancers or as the freelancer themselves."

What success have you had, either working from home, or employing those who do?

Now, I reckon Th3 Core crowd has a far higher percentage of self-starters and work-at-homes that Slashdot. So, assuming she has minimal tech skills, but enough smarts to ask on Slashdot, what would you recommend?

Focus on writing and photography for her local area.  Otherwise, she's going to have to compete at elf price levels.

What RCJ said

Aside from that, its impossible to help without SOME positives to play with

What we have at the moment is....
* Knows less than people who charge less about the stuff she can do.
* Not a great writer.
* Confidence an issue (?)

If confidence is an issue, then she may be underestimating her abilities - on the other hand, she may be correct - impossible to say with the info we have.

That's a tough question. The answer is probably dozens of different possible ways (not just learning something and offering a service), but probably only a couple or few at best that work well for any one person.

To pick out a skill to learn, spend time learning it, and then trying to make money at it is a long road with high potential for failure. Particularly with just the online market. Focusing on local with current connections would probably make for an easier start.

I would probaby tell someone like this to simply start a self hosted wp blog. Learn some design, some php, some css, mix in ads, seo, traffic, etc. See if anything seems fun and/or successful for them. Local seo, for example, could be a really good avenue, but you need to be able to produce and may require some away from home meetings.

I think it's really hard to just pick and idea, run with it, and find real success, particularly when starting from nothing. But, just getting out there and doing something can open doors and give you ideas and knowledge to keep moving forward towards the goal.

She might do well just by becoming a self-publisher.  I have a friend who did a niche site on a type of furniture he was researching to buy for himself.  He's not highly skilled but knows enough to install basic software and very basic SEO.  He ended up using Joomla (could have just as easily been WP) with some product reviews and put adsense on the site.  The site makes like $80/month, not lots, but if he did this say 20 times it could be a nice chunk of change.