Ok, I know all the traditional ways of submissions of various kinds but I am looking for some off the hook ways specially for health sites. How do you promote your health site ?
Specially for traffic in short time and links for long time, you need to do social bookmarking. What you need to do is --- look for some great article/topic/posts from you site. In medical terms... look for some great experiment, cure for disease, case study, modern instrument, method, technique etc from your site. If you don't have one then have something of this kind on your site. Then submit to social bookmarking sites. Make sure that title you write should able to catch the attraction. Here is a great list (hand picked) of One Hundred Bookmark sites.
Check out some social sites like "myspace.com". Also add your site in craiglist.org, if you find the option.
You need to do something similar to what this guy did...great link bait 8 diseases that give you superhuman powers (this Digg headline was way more creative than the original headline on the site) http://www.autoadviceoffl.com/Braindisease.htm This brought huge amounts of traffic for this guy, unfortunately, he runs an auto sales place in Florida, so the content really didn't match his site's focus. This would have worked well for your content though, get creative and copy this same concept somehow. Purplepeeps
Exchange links with a site on exactly the same niche.If your site is on diabetes, exchange with other sites on diabetes and make sure the link is in a visible are where there is likely to be click throughs.