As the waves of Google Quality Score changes and “Slaps” continue to roll in, it’s becoming more and more clear that the ‘Old School’ approach to PPC affiliate marketing just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Things have changed too fast and too drastically to keep doing PPC the old way.

In the past an inwardly linked, extra-long sales page with a couple of brief product reviews would likely have performed very well in terms of search ranking. With all the changes that have happened in the last year to AdWords Quality Score, it’s quickly becoming apparent how much additional work is going to be involved in getting any kind of burn on the first page of the SERPs.

That means that many affiliates now find themselves at a crossroads. They can either learn to build deep-dish original content into their websites, hire someone to do it for them, or pack it up and start looking for work somewhere else.

But don’t despair. There ARE solutions out there. Affiliates can learn a lot from the strategies that organic SEO pros have had to learn over the years. Hard-won lessons tell us that elements such as trusted outgoing links (not affiliate links), privacy policies, ‘contact us’ and ‘about us’ pages are now must-have components for a top-performing PPC campaign.

So how much content is required? We estimate that at least 15 pages of solid, keyword-dense content is now required to achieve even marginally affordable minimum CPCs.

Is your content 100% unique? It should be. Make sure you exercise care even in the re-phrasing of your existing content so that Google continues to view your content as relevant and valuable.

If you were to do a copy audit of the content on your site right now, how much of it would you say is 100% unique? If it’s not 100% original, update it as soon as possible – Google’s tolerance for fluff or duplicate content has reached an all-time low.

If you’re having a tough time creating original content yourself, there are affordable article sites that you can use to fill in the blanks on your pages. Constant Content (www.constant-content.com) is one of them. It offers on-order articles covering a wide range of topics by both professional and amateur writers.

You’ll want to start thinking about boosting your original content sooner rather than later. Given recent industry trends its very possible that attrition in the PPC affiliate space will continue in the coming months and into 2010, as search engines continue to squeeze out affiliates who refuse to up their game. In many ways it’s the perfect time for serious affiliates to test their mettle.

Some conscientious affiliates are starting to look to other search engines now (such as Bing www.bing.com) as a way to develop alternate online revenue streams. And as time goes on, new solutions like these will surely emerge to deal with all the industry changes that are sure to come in the future.

So stay tuned to our RevenueWire blog in the coming weeks for more tips on how to roll with the punches and stay on top of the PPC game!