The price war on Elance is real, but sticking to project based pricing and being in a not too competitive field may help.
I made a simple dataviz of the top elance skills in the programming field:
http://www.datamaplab.com/posts/the-top-itprogramming-skills...
It is impressive to see how competitive some skills are with hundreds of freelancers for a listed skill per corresponding open jobs.
