I recommend you stick to a very clearly defined small niche instead of general health.
From my standpoint, and this is somewhat backed by experience as I have family members in that field, most serious (buyer) people that don't already subscribe to those strong health blogs want some really small niche to immerse themselves in. That is how so many strains of alternative medicine popped out over the years. The homeopathy people hate mainstream medicine (and products) just as much as they love alternative medicine, get my drift here?
It is definitely the harder way to do this, but also if you can build up an authority website you are literally golden.
Make sure you know what you're talking about very well and try to keep it confined to what your target audience expects.
If you want an easier way of doing things, and sticking to broad medicine/health, I'd absolutely recommend building each article in mind with the exact things you'll promote. So, when you are doing research, find a product that looks really professional and serious, then find out all about it and the problems it solves, then create content (with long and very specific niche keywords, that answers the reader's questions and invites them to check the product out (and grab yourself a commission).
For traffic, in both ways of doing this, among doing natural backlinking as you usually would, I think it's key you manually build links from forums/media/other blogs.
If people have a health issue, especially one that really disturbs them, they will often look at 3-4+ options before selecting the one they trust the most.
When I have a health issue I usually open around 10 tabs from Google's first page, you get the idea.
THE DAMN HOME REMEDIES
Home remedies are incredibly popular in this broke day and age. If you are promoting products that's your main enemy. If you wanna try AdSense or such, then absolutely look into home remedy content.
People will always try to get a free fix with natural home remedies if possible, but if that doesn't work out for them they will be pressured to buy a product.
If you are promoting your page via comments or posts, make sure to point out that the product is better (worked better for you personally) than a home remedy for reasons X, Y, and Z.
