To give you a true answer, no it is not easy to beat the online competition. It is better to get into a good offline company in the field and climb the success ladder there. Later, you can form an association with similar-minded very skilled people and open an online company, and achive success there too. Every other job you can do at your present skills-level, will and can be done by people who are already working as established freelancers. And in the online marketplaces like elance, guru, etc., those top freelancers have so many positive feedbacks that almost nobody will be interested in employing a novice who doesn't even have an impressive portfolio of mock projects. That's the reality... even if you find a job here and there, usually earning only a few dollars, it will be difficult to find consistent workload.
But may be you're luckier and different, so who knows?