Comment on blogs and forum submission are best way for backlinks. You can do article submission for getting backlinks.
Yes you can certainly build up your backlinks by blog commenting and forum posts though google does not give much weight to forum links as there are so many links in each page and it (link juice) spreads among them all.
As per my point of view blog comment and forum posting is the best way to get backlinks as wel as get your keyword up.
If you want backlinks, be sure to comment on sites that do not have the nofollow tag. That tag tells the search engines to not follow (ie ignore) such links (lots of sites have that tag to discourage spammers). Nofollow sites can still get you traffic from those sites, but it won't help with search engine rankings. There are free software tools that will search google for your keywords, and find the results that are blogs and tell you whether or not the nofollow tag is present for each blog found.