PR News Wires a way of getting links?

Apologies if wrong place, did not know where else to post.

[stgeorge]

I am looking to do some PR news realeases to promote a new concept. First and foremost I am doing it as I believe I have a solid story to tell.

As online PR is pretty new to me, I have come accross some interesting PR sites.

Some sites like xeal.com proclaim that they use press releases as a way of building incoming links. The piece basically gets released into various networks. In some cases your articles end up in full on another website / blog via XML, not just as an abstract. Hence you would have links pointing back from those sites.

First of all I would like to know if this is just marketing trash from these PR agencies.

Secondly, has anyone worked with an agency that was worth the money, or should I just submit to as many as possible PR network myself?

Any comments appreciated and again apologies if this is off topic here.

st george

[howiejs]

I'm a big fan of Prweb -- I think its $10 and you get in their feed.

Prleap is free

[jonnyzone]

Press releases are a great way to build quality incoming links. It also helps to build out your site by adding a new page with a backlink to a home page or whatever page you want to rank for.

[wheel]

I've done two press releases through those folks, both times paid for the $350 release.

One was on a very narrow niche blog that I run (insurance book reviews actually - boring) and I just wanted to try them out. Didn't get much, a bit of a spike in traffic.

Just ran one for a client where the release had a bit of a bite ('biggest blahblah product on the web). They didn't get much in the way of what I see as good permanent links, but they did get picked up by a number of online news places. The traffic from those releases paid for the press release many times over. The client was happy too - I'm working away on starting their SEO,telling them to be patient, and for one week we had a steady stream of traffic and leads.

So yes, do the press release :).

[renesisx]

We've just sent our Press Release for their "polishing" service and we'll send out our release through them tomorrow, so I'll let you know how the traffic goes ;)