Looks to me that competition is everywhere for everything. There are a couple of billions of websites for any given niche. Hosting is $10/year for unlimited Gb with unlimited bandwith with multiple domain!! You can get materials for nothing. I, myself, have 19Gb of everything possible for $5 and not selling anything. I think we are heading to the death of doing a living on the internet. Making money on the side, yes. After a daily job, yes. But not making it the job. You want to do an online casino, and it's free over there. You want to do a porn video? Free over here... Want to do a directory? there are million of PR4-5-6-7 absolutly free... I was looking for a particular book. $19.95 in store. So I bought it on Ebay for $3.75 + $2.50 S/h. Next day, I saw it for free online !!! Why bother to try? I guess you need to be inside the top 100 on alexa to make a living Am I depressing??
You are not alone.As the internet spread further and wider,there will be more competitors entering each day.
The key is just knowing how to compete. You need better quality, something completely new, better service, better guarantees, etc. If you're competing with something free, find a way to add to it perhaps. Even free things can be monetized.
You should try a niche market, usually meaning the high end market. I took that route and do ok myself. If you are in a business selling low end products OR services, you will have a million competitors, but if you go high end, your competition drops a lot, but so does your client pool but there are always people who want the best out there and willing to pay for it IF you are the best.
Hostingbiz is harder than before .. much harder, every eBiz is harder .. BUT, its true.. teh money is bigger. there is a way to get lots of dollars..!
There is always a way to improve on something, and do something different to make money, sometimes you just have to think outside of the box.
You can always do things better and offer quality service. It will be a tough start, but in the long run you win.
Selling the shovels is a good philosophy to follow. That's why B2B is bigger than all B2C industries combined. I think your problem is your are stuck in the "webmaster forum rut." There's plenty of opportunities out there. Everything you mentioned are webmaster-type things found in forums. The world's a huge mecca of business. Step outside the forum and away from the Internet for a moment and think. I can't even count the number of people I know who make good (to a lot) of money on the Internet. Here's the cold truth. If you are someone that's not very educated and under-skilled, your life will continue to get worse. You'll continue to get pushed out of the marketplace as others like you will panic and start using "price" as the main marketing weapon. Just like them, you'll think the world is coming to an end and the 3-10 money-making ideas that you can think of will slowly die. The Internet business world is no different, in principle, than real life. The guy who built his life solely around selling cassette tapes and records eventually went down hill and died. Why? He died, because he failed to improve himself and to give himself the opportunity to evolve with the marketplace. He died because he was no longer of value to the marketplace.
I just had to post on this. It reminded me of my business course, something one of the instructors said when someone was "complaining" about the difficulties of starting up a business and how it should be easy. His answer was, "If it was easy, everyone would do it", not only referred to the start up but also running the business. Basically, as marketjunction stated, continual business success in this day and age is about continued learning, understanding the business and trends and then adapting to them. As they say, the cream rises to the top. Maybe that doesn't help much but it was my "win one for the gipper" speech.