You might be able to pick up some high tech knowledge and do consulting within a reasonable number of months. VOIP, security and database modeling are in demand/high paying I believe. Sharing your knowledge, depending on your talents/skills, might be easier to get into than actually coding software. Or if you have an aptitude for programming that could be easier.

I think the key to getting paid a lot though is HOW you get paid. There are a lot of websites like odesk and rentacoder where overseas coders (and some US) are working for pretty low rates. If you are looking for 40/hr it might be pretty hard to get paid that much on those sites. I started coding when I was seven but when I went onto odesk I set my rate at 15/hr because there were tens of thousands of overseas coders willing to do php/ajax development for less than that (still making 15/hr but there's plenty of US coders on odesk making 25/hr so I should have increased it already).

So maybe you already figured that out but since you put internet in your question I thought I should point out that you probably want to avoid most of those freelance internet sites if you are starting out and looking for a U.S. rate.

http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/ and http://programmermeetdesigner.com/ look like they have U.S. rates for online freelancers.
craigslist might be another place to look.
meetup.com might be a place to go to start networking once you have skills ( or to ask your question in person to small business owners). The trick to getting a higher rate is being able to negotiate that rate directly with clients rather than having middlemen taking chunks out.

Of course you need some skills and knowledge first. It depends.. what I know about is software development. Some people cannot code at all. If you have talent for graphic design or interest/knowledge in some technical or other area then you should pursue that.

What skills, interests and talents do you currently have or were born with? There are going to be some jobs that you are going to be much better suited for.

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