I have used the paid service from
prleap.com . You can insert urls at the $20 level and up. You also get to dictate the demographic of your audience, to a certain degree. A small amount of traffic was generated but the beauty of the
PR is that the
PR page will rank very high for the keywords you SEO the release for.
I have a question about this though. Will a link in this format (minus the space after URL) count as a direct contextual link?
[URL ="http://www.prleap.com"]Press Release Distribution[/URL]