We are still seeing very nice returns with our press release submissions, from a buzz perspective, a traffic perspective, and from a link building boost. From the SEO perspective solely, including 3-4 hyperlinks using anchor text is acceptable and will produce some backlinks.

It is crucial that a press release does have a newsworthy hook, and this is challenging.  A new hire, an expansion into another market, results of a survey, speaking engagement, company milestone. A creative mind can come up with a good idea at least every 2 months if not more often.  We suggest to our clients to issue a company-wide memo soliciting ideas, because it is your hands-on staff that may notice a new development; asking staff to frame their thinking in terms of newsworthy events should bring at least 2-3 new ideas.  Bringing in current events is a good way to keep your releases relevant and to bring better results, as many news sources like to talk about the trendiest news topics.  It was election, now it is economy.  Holidays are another relevant time sensitive hook.

The release needs to pass a sniff test though; making up garbage spammy articles will do more damage than good.   The best PR services will not even accept them.  Too frequent is another mistake we see; moderation is best.  If you keep your focus on the buzz marketing perspective (Is this news worth a press release?), then you can generally be assured your release is not too frequent, irrelevant, boring, or spammy. Grammar, punctuation, good writing, these are important too.

Free PR services? Sure, if that is all your budget allows. We do not use them as a rule, but our clients are large established sites with a marketing budget.  If you are a small company and do not want to fork over $2-300 for a release, you can get some benefit still from writing the release yourself and using a free PR service.