I kind of want to test out other avenues of marketing these two I have never tried. I'm maybe looking for someone to help guide me in the right direction and paying for their time and services. I'm doing this to promote a web hosting company. Which one would probably convert better?
You can't compare them, because they're not intended to do the same thing. Press releases are not a marketing tool; they're a PR tool. They're a small component of longer term larger PR campaigns for building awareness and exposure, responding to criticism and crises, etc. They can lead to massive exposure with a highly targeted audience, but if your primary goal is converting to sales, then it's not the tool for you. Unless there's something really newsworthy with the company, you shouldn't be using them just to try them anyway.
Fair enough, that makes sense and I've heard others say the same. Then i've seen a few say that they like to use press releases as a marketing tool.
Craigslist ads expires after a while. Advertising there may bring you some instant results, but you have to post there periodically. Press release is more like for long term goal. If done right, it can catch attention to thousands over time. jhmattern offers PR services, you can talk to her. And also you can advertise on my classified ads site http://www.webcosmo.com Its free.
Those are also the people who don't know what they are, what they're about, or how to use them most effectively. Anyone can get some backlinks and traffic from a release. What the marketing crowd fails to tell you is the VAST majority of that is total crap... links on scraper sites, traffic that rarely converts b/c it's people looking to see if you're worth writing about and not b/c they're interested in what you're offering, etc. You'll always get better results if you use releases the right way. The real quality backlinks and targeted traffic come from legitimate coverage in authority sources. That's PR; not marketing. Use them wrong, and you risk damaging your company's reputation if you do have real news to release down the road - you'll be hard-pressed to get solid coverage in the future if you're seen as a PR spammer from the beginning (what the marketing folks most often do with them).