While many try to hold visitors to their sites, one of the best ways to get traffic is to "let go" and share your traffic. Write something useful that promotes someone else, and you may find them promoting your site for you.
I recently wrote a post about using a vendor's product
instead of a database. A friend mentioned it on Twitter, one of that vendors developers follows him on twitter. Within 20 minutes, my logs showed a huge amount of traffic coming from that company. Looking at domain and user agent's allowed me to guess the number of people.
The folks at the vendor promoted the post pretty heavily. I received emails from their developers, marketing guys, even the CTO. They even linked to it from the company website under "buzz".
Back to the main point, the post wasn't about trying to promote them for any specific reason. The post is actually pretty full of links. Useful links as references, links that help users. Think of the papers you had to write in school with footnotes and references...
links are the footnotes of the web. When a user wants more info, you can give a link to another source. Users will use the back button to come back.
Will you lose some visitors? of course. But, the benefit is a site that is more community oriented, which will give you much greater long term traffic. Links can also add some appeal to a post, much the way an image does. We all know images can break up long text to make for a better experience for users. Well, links can do the same thing when used appropriately.
Don't be afraid to link out to other sites. If you mention somebody else's product/site/whatever, drop them a message referencing your site. You may find that they'll do all the promotion for you.
According to my logs, that one post was viewed by over 6K unique IP addresses (probably more actual visitors) in a very short period of time.
