Develop content that people would share with one another, and find on other sites.
Videos - develop videos that drive "traffic" to your website ... Vimeo YouTube 5min or your own site
Blogs - have people in your company start writing blogs and sharing their expertise on the web, and others will naturally want to check out your products ... LinkedIn Blogger or your own site
PR - have people cultivate relationships in forums and with publications and post stuff that your bloggers write
there are many ways to get traffic besides relying on one search engine
and by the way, even ON that search engine, you should be creating all kinds of things to "take over" the first page, if you are really trying to vie for traffic
e.g. on GOOGLE:
youtube videos will show up if you make them
google+ profiles will show up if you make them
local listings, images, maps, bla bla bla
which means Google is telling you to upload a lot of content to GOOGLE owned properties in order to promote your site
so if you really want google traffic that badly you should do it!
So what you say might answer the first question, but not the follow up one. Well, your "e.g. on GOOGLE:" answers it, but the fact that you use google for that example already shows that there really isn't any way around that. He wasn't asking how to improve ranking. He was asking for alternatives to google search traffic. (Unless I got that wrong)
But I just told you. Social. Linkedin. Vimeo. YouTube. Other things. Sure you don't get the "instant win" of having a big player link to you. But you also are not so dependent on ONLY that big player.
It's kind of like the difference between being discovered by an A&R department of a record label or going the indie route like Ben Haggerty.
How do you go from "people won't discover my own site under google's new algorithm" to no one on linkedin and other places will ever discover any articles linking to my site without google?
We do post things on LinkedIn and Facebook, however we get only a tiny fraction of the traffic that we get from Google. In addition, the traffic from Google seems to convert to paying customers at a higher rate--not sure why yet.