Light light light! Average indoor lighting is not sufficient for pictures taken at a reasonable shutter speed, so for indoor shots light that room up like a turkey day parade! Remember that the flash is a pictures worst enemy, it's a harsh white light that tends to wash out color and make people look like something out of a Rob Zombie film. You can usually pick up the clip style spots pretty cheaply if you know where to look, and they are about the best solution for adequate lighting there is. I suggest using a normal high wattage incandescent bulb as opposed to one of the newer energy saving ones. The old school incandescent produce a light with a hint of yellow that gives the shot a bit of warmth, where the new style of bulb produces a bluish light that makes shadows jump out and washes out most lighter colors. When setting up your lights try to bounce the light off of a wall or the ceiling and onto your object to avoid shadows. Be careful with that though as the bounced light will pick up color traits from whatever you bounce it off of. If you cant get a couple of spots for the job, torche style lamps can always work, but remember that they are bouncing the light off the ceiling, so if your ceiling isn’t white it can alter the shot. If for any reason you cant get adequate lighting then you will need to go to a slower shutter speed, if that’s the case a tripod is a must
Also make sure that the only things in the shot are the things you want in the shot. I cant tell you how many otherwise good shots I’ve ruined because of miscellaneous crap that was laying around of behind the target. That’s part of the reason that (when I was shooting on a pretty regular basis) that I started setting up shoot stages. Pick one half of a room, or a bed, or a table (tables seem to work the best), clean it out completely, cover the backdrop wall with white sheets (unless there is a lot of white in the shot already, in which case a light cream color works fine) and then set it up for the shots you want. When setting up your stage, try to set it up so that the target is at least 3 feet off the ground. In general you don’t want the ground in the shot, it’s coming towards the camera so it can throw off perspective. So keeping the target nice and high off the ground allows you to back further away, giving you a greater range of shots.
After all that it’s all about quantity. Shoot shoot shoot! Shoot from as many different angles and in as many positions as possible at first until you learn which angles work best for your target. The joy of shooting digital is that you can shoot for free (about the only thing I prefer digital to 35mm for). Once you get to learn the workings better your percentage of good to great shots will pick up, but in the beginning I found that about 1 in 10 would be a really good shot. After I really got the hang of it I was getting about 25% usable to 75% waste, but those 25% were always really good.
Hope that helps, and remember that no matter what you do, if the target isn’t having fun, the shots wont be worth it. So keep the energy and mood up, and the good pics will flow naturally.