I have been doing manual SEO on my site for months now but am targeting quite competitive keywords and phrases. All link building I have done has been manual and I have been carefully selecting links on PR3-PR7 pages and getting OKish results. I need to start making some real money with my site now and I am considering purchasing mass submissions to help speed up my ranking, even with low PR pages I feel it balance out my link profile... Feels like I don't really have anything to lose anyway at this point if worst comes to worst... I am tired of following googles white hat BS which clearly is all bullshit as theres plent of sites in my niche ranking with what must be clearly black hat methods and even just exact match domains. Maybe I'm just being impatient?
No, do not think to try black hat. If your website will be banned once , it can not be recover. For ex- If your website is ban by Aksimet(you can not do the comment on wordpress/forums and different website) , your website can not be unbanned until it is newly register. Use white hat and wait for the results. Be patient , you will get definitely good result.
I won't suggest going after mass submission to your main money site. Its will always get your site flagged in the eyes of Google. What you can of course do is do this mass submission to the 1 tier links...I mean to the articles directories and the web 2.0 sites that link to your sites. This will pass the link juice to your site without affecting it negatively! And I hope you did your keyword research properly. To start with, avoid going for too much of the competitive keywords. Go for the low hanging fruits to start with. This will get you faster results and thereby save you from the frustration. Also, DO NOT solely depend on the Google rankings. Let SEO be just one of your traffic strategies. Promote your site actively with other source of traffic too.