White hat and manual posting all the way? What is the name of this forum?
Depending on the niche you are in, it will take more or less volume of links, but focus more on high page ranking sites and drip the links in time, rather than blasting all the way.
As far as software, I would recommend using zennoposter and creating your own templates if you have hard niches, if they are easy, you can use auto-posting software such as senuke. Stay away from blasting software such as xrumer and scrapebox until you have a better idea of what you are doing.