$1,000 will buy you about one feature worth of magazine quality pillar content plus effort to launch the content (by contacting relevant blogs, news organizations, etc). The ROI on evergreen content over the long term is stupendous -- it brings in links like crazy (which translates into direct SEO benefits), brings in traffic for forever, and is just stupidly cost effective.

Here's a (cheaper) bit of evergreen content which is Pretty Darn Useful for my niche: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm . I think that probably took, with its sister page, 2.5 hours to put together, so call that $250. (I have since become vastly more efficient at pumping out the content. You can hear more about that in a week when the article is done.)

Those two pages have, at last count, something like 100 backlinks, including from some fairly high authority pages ("Would you mind if we included your resource in this year's copy of the [American state] reading curricula?" swoon). Buying links on that scale would cost me thousands of dollars per month (I do not recommend buying links).

That page alone had 30,000 visitors in 2008 alone. Buying 30,000 visitors, all of whom wanted something very close to what I sell, would cost me about $1,800 via AdWords.

Direct revenue as a result of it was only about $1,000 in 2008. (I say "only" because it is one of the most poorly monetized pages on my site. I tried to strike a balance between monetization and linkability, mostly aimed at linkability since that was published before anyone had heard of me.)

So yeah, with $1,000, I'd suggest writing (or commissioning) some pillar content aimed straight at the people who you want to convince to give you money/influence.