My sites that do well have between 15-25 pages a piece They're very keyword rich and have #1 rankings for almost every keyword I went after. Each site averages 3000-5000 unique visitors per day and I have a 5.5% CTR. I have all of these sites on the same server, but split between a couple IP's.
Do some research and find a hot product or topic. See what kind of search volume it's main keywords are getting and check how much competition there is for those keywords. Once you've got that, get a good domain name with the keywords in it and start building content. Make your site unique with something useful to the visitor. Then start building links. Buy a social bookmarking package from Red_Virus in the Buy, Sell Trade section. Keep building links where ever you can and you'll start to see some results in the search engines. That's the best advice I can give you.
This sounds like fucking Digital Point. Read what I said above and start doing exactly that. It's not instant gratification like PPC shit. You have to be in it for the duration. It will take months to see good results...but if you put in the work, you will make consistent money every day. I have sites that I've worked my ass of on, built good content, links from every damn place on the planet and just never was able to get good search results. That can be hard to handle sometimes. To put in that much work and not get the results your used to. But I learn a lot from each failure, and make sure I don't duplicate it on the next project.
I nothing but respect for the guys who are kicking ass with PPC, but finding a niche and doing successful SEO, grinding it out trying to get good SERP's is equally as challenging but can be much more sustainable over the long haul.