How do you find your backlinks?

I understand posting manually is a good thing, but don't most SEO profesionals that are white hat still use software for finding backlinks?

If not, how can I find some good backlinks. forums, social bookmarking, articles, directories are all difficult to find and if you want to beat the competition for something competitive even if you have excellent research skills don't you still need software?

Backlink checker maybe? For me, it does

search on the fprums or even google, for search tersm such as high pr web 2.0 lists, high quality social book makring sites, high quality article directory's. Use your brain..... Or you can use scrapebox, scrape the platform and then check page rank.

SEO Spyglass, Majestic, aHrefs.... all SEO professionals would use at least one, and more likely all 3 to keep track of not only their own links, but to also see where the competition is getting theirs. After all how else would you outrank your competing sites, and do it in an organized manner? Best way to find links that are working is to see what others in your niche are using to rank, or go and check out some super competitive niches, and see what is working there. These tools allow you to do just that. That goes for so called "Whitehat" guys also.... who still build/buy links... just not as spammy as auto submission blasts.

You can use scrapebox, and then search google for footprints (for different platforms. if you need to get started with ScrapeBox you can checkout the "Rapid Ranking Blueprint Video Training Course", it is very good) posted by other people. Check your competitors backlinks using Ahrefs.com. Do some more in-depth searches and lookup the backlinks backlinks too understand how their backlinking profile looks like.

I just use ahrefs.

i dont think anyone actually read the question to what he was actually looking for, hes not looking for backlink analysis although it did seem that way...