If you want to promote a forum then I would say that develop content, it is the good method of forum promotion, believe me.

I use statcounter, it is also very effective to understand your visitors.

I was using submission tools before but I don't use submission tools as it is not helpful today. We need to do manual work.

If you research low competitive keyword then you may not have to build links to your website, link building is needed for competition mainly.

With the effect of Penguin update, lots of sites have been given low ranking, if you want to build links to your site then you have to use several methods of link building for better result so that it would look natural to search engines.