New to link building

New to seo and a bit confused, I don't have scrapebox or anything at the moment and will be doing everything manually.
So basically all I have to do is the following correct? Please correct me anywhere.

1) I'll use backlinkwatch or a program to find the backlinks of my competitors, I'll look through them for auto approve blogs, when I find one I'll make a comment inserting random name/email..etc. and in the comment box ill insert my backlink like followed " <a href="your url here">A Keyword Here</a>

2) ping the page using something like ping-o-matic to get it indexed faster.

3) ill also use a auto approve blog search engine to find revelant blogs and such of my niche and make backlinks using same method as 1). ill do no follow links to so it looks more natural to google.

Is that all there is to it?

Also, I was thinking about forum backlinks too, I noticed researching some of my competition that when I follow through to their supposed backlink their is nothing on the page with their anchor text or website, even when I look through the source. Are they magically hiding it somehow or was it probably removed?
is the most common way to do forum backlinks is to just create a profile and insert my website link somewhere in my profile if it allows html then ping my profile?

Thanks, and any other advice welcomed.

I think you are in for quite a bit of work if you want to do everything manually. You mentioned scrapebox - it is only $57. I think you should choose one tool and build your backlinks from there. You probably could never keep up with your competition if you don't invest in some tools.

yeah, id rather learn to do things manually first then pay money for a program when i dont even know the basics yet and probably wouldn't be able to efficiently use it, i am interested in it though. the current key phrase im shooting for the competition is very low, im talking 30-1000 backlinks is what backlinkwatch is revealing. its just hard to find descriptive answers to things because people that have been doing this a long time expect you to know the seo/marketing slang and basics right from the get go.