To be honest I hate keyword research - I don't have money for Market Samurai or other software like that and doing all of it by hand is a real pain in the ***. Do you think it's possible to get some traffic without looking for best / least competitive niches/keywords?... Just find a broad topic like health and post new content every day. I'm not looking for $1000s. Even ~$1 a day would be fine at the beginning.
You can get initial traffic that will not be sustainable. You could mail/post on FB for your friends but that is limited traffic. If your site is so amazingly different and unique that it goes viral, that is another thing but usually to get visitors, you will need to do keyword research. Think of it this way: You have a site about what I am looking for but I don't know your site exists. The only way for me to find out about your site is through a search engine. In the long run you need search traffic. Btw, what is such a pain in keyword research? At the basic level, it should take you no more than 10 minutes to come up with a short list to start off
If you write quality content the traffic is guaranteed to come. Sometimes it takes time - but your efforts will be rewarded.
For 5-page website it's not so difficult but if you have more pages (100+) or more websites it becomes quite tedious. Check keywords (needs to have x searches and $x PPC), for every keyword check competition (with quotes, without the quotes, intitle, allinanchor etc etc etc) Bleh, I hate that...
I agree with skykid. You don't need to target specific keywords if you write high quality content. If the content is relevant, and original, the traffic will come. It won't happen overnight, but you'll build a solid foundation for years to come.
Well, I don't disagree. But that's the way the game is to be played. Quality content is good, but if there is SEO it is better. You don't really need so many specifics. If you want to concentrate on the content, I would say pick up a couple of keywords and just look at the competition. Low competition with decent monthly searches in Google Adwords should be a good start, in my opinion.