In Shawn Collins' FeedFront Magazine, Nick Usborne wrote:

We figure that if we take a list of a few hundred long tail keyword phrases, we can write an article around each, and then make out like a bandit with free search engine traffic.

Realizing how much work is involved to do that, we may start looking at outsourcing our content writing overseas for $2 a page. We may also turn to automated content rewriting software to churn out pages for even less.

Sweat Shop and Robotic Automation Content Factories can make you money, but as Nick points out, high-quality content has big advantages. According to data from Yahoo!

...social links spread through Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo's own status updates "can drive an order of magnitude more sharing on Yahoo." ... when people click through from a status update ... they end up spending at least twice as much time there than the average visitor.

High quality content not only serves as a sustainable foundation for SEO (unlike junk content, which is likely to be dropped from the search engines as fast as they can recognize it), but since it's also shared by readers with their friends, it gets more non-search traffic. And visitors who click through a recommendation from a friend arrive in a more receptive frame of mind, which can only increase conversions.