What are ways to become less reliant on search traffic

[crick]

Volatility in SERPS means people are often looking for alternative ways to generate traffic without actually paying for it i.e. advertising. So, what are all other ways to generate free traffic, constant traffic, which is significant enough to become a viable alternative to search engine traffic.

Ranking well in all the search engines is one way to diverify some search engine risk i.e. if you stop ranking well in Google then you still have significant traffic from the other two, but what are all the non search engine traffic.

[gregbo]

The answer is to look to how businesses became successful without massive ad budgets before search engines came along. Take the old-school approach: provide a product or service that's useful and affordable; give prompt and meaningful customer service; get satisfied customers to advertise for you via word-of-mouth (or in the online case, via word-of-link).

[texasville]

For websites..it seems that you must be very, very informative.
If you are, then after a period of time and some viral marketing you begin to pick up links and are discussed in social bookmark clubs and even wiki sites.
directories can also provide a certain amount of traffic.

[piatkow]

A lot depends on business type.
If you have customers coming to you through non-internet channels then try and get permission to add them to email lists which will promote your site.
Have an email newsletter if there are periodic changes to products or services that will interest your customers. This can get a decent number of hits. (Very good in arts and entertainment promoting gigs or exhibitions)
Get links from appropriate trade organisations - link back to them.
If your business is locality based then look for local reference sites.
In certain areas of business there is a lot of value in exchanging links - I know a mail order music company that links to appropriate specialist music magazines and of course gets return links from the magazines and artists.

[Easy_Coder]

Do you have anything that would qualify for recurring montly fee's? If you did and as you build up your business it would relieve some of the pressure from months where your search engine leads dropped.