Is Keyword Research Really That Important?

I was reading the the article marketing challenge thread and came on some great advice that I felt needed it's own thread. I know it's been reported time and time again how and why you need to do keyword research. I want to share an example that just happened with me, in an effort to make new people realize just how important it is to research your keywords, rather than just throw up articles and pages related to your subject.

This all came from a site in Hamida's signature. Here's the link: How To Do Basic Keyword Research | Internet Marketing Ramblings

I recently started a non-IM blog with the intent of building it into an authority site, and using it for affiliate marketing. I did the usual keyword research of going into the Google Keyword Tool and pulling out a bunch of keywords that were related to my niche. It's in a huge niche, so I figured it shouldn't be tough to start pulling a little of that traffic my way. By now, I'm getting visitors from a few search results, but not as much as I would have liked. After reading the post from Hamida on her blog, I went through and actually started doing the searches to find the true competition in Google. I never really did this before, because it can take forever doing it manually, and I just wanted to get going.

While doing my research, though, I found a few real gems in the mix, that I would never had thought would be so good. So far, I have 1 long tail keyword that gets an average of 74,000 searches every month. There are only 1,870 people directly competing for that keyword. Another gets 22,000 searches each month, with less than 10,000 sites directly competing for it.

Now I realize how important it is to do your homework and weed out the real winners, instead of just going through the list picking the ones that I though looked good.

Although I know that many, many people have said the exact same thing, it has never really soaked in until now. Thanks, Hamida, for the great post that finally made me take action.