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We’re going to loop back today to a tool I’ve mentioned before, the Google Adwords Estimator tool, but we’re going to use it in a slightly different way than before.

Previously I’d recommended using it to prioritize the content that you create for your site, starting with the terms that had the highest CPC estimate, as those would in theory pay you the most as an affiliate for Adsense clicks on those terms on your site. Since time is at a premium, that’s a good way to work smarter and maximize the bang for your content-creation efforts.

The Adwords Estimator tool, though, can do some other neat stuff, too. If you’re taking the generalist, shotgun affiliate approach (i.e. trying lots of smaller niche sites and seeing what sticks), you sometimes encounter a bit of an odd conundrum. You’re ready and willing to bang out a site but you don’t have anything planned, as far as areas you’d like to target.

While that sounds dumb, it’s not uncommon, especially if you build lots of mini-sites that are 10 pages or less. You can usually brainstorm and come up with a decent niche after some cogitating, but a quick shortcut is to use the Google Adwords Estimator tool to do the brainstorming for you.

To get started, pull up the tool here. Click on the big tab titled “Site-Related Keywords”. which is right next to “Keyword Variations” which is the default tab that’s selected when you land on the page.

Next you’ll be prompted to enter a URL. Enter http://en.wikipedia.org into the URL field. Then be sure to check the box beneath it, which says “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”

In the dropdown menu below that, select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” and then below that, enter “100″ into the “Max CPC” field. When all that is done, click the “Get Keywords” button.

You’ll get a big honking list of keywords and CPC estimates, so click on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort them with the highest at the top.

So what just happened? We basically just used a dynamic, constantly changing source of data (Wikipedia) to do the brainstorming work for us, as far as finding potentially profitable niches to build an affiliate site around.

If you scan down the results, some results should leap out at you, with surprisingly high estimated CPCs. Because the home page of Wikipedia is dynamic, with random content pushed to it throughout the day, your results will be different, but when I did it the following jumped out at me:

martial arts billing: $11.07

martial arts software: $10.91

What you’re looking for isn’t necessarily the highest CPC estimate, but more a sweet spot, as far as a term that pays well (I consider anything over $5.00 as paying well), is reasonably obscure with little competition (I just ignore generic ones like “Bally fitness” even if it pays very well, as it’s too competitive), and has a decent amount of search volume (if only 2 searches are done on the term per month, it does you little good to build a site for it, even if the CPC estimate is high).

The Estimator tool has options in the pulldown menu to view the same terms for search volume trends and other data, so you can get a broad idea there as far as how often the terms are searched for. For much closer to exact data, many affiliates use WordTracker, although it’s pretty pricey so you might hold off on that until you’re making the big bucks.

Determining overall competition for terms simply takes some experience, but plugging the term into Google and running a search is the basic way to go about it. See how many total results there are and check out the top listings to get a gauge of much competition there is, how high the PageRank of the sites with the top results are, how well-optimized the pages in the top spots are, etc.

Using the “martial arts billing” and “martial arts software” above, poking around shows that those are actually fairly competitive terms, as far as existing pages targeting them, so building a site around them isn’t a slam-dunk proposition. So you shouldn’t necessarily expect to mine gold each time you run through the process above. it’s not some magic formula for riches, just a nice way to mine for potentially profitable niches that you might never have thought of otherwise.

You can also put any URL you’d like into the tool to analyze for keywords, so play around with it, trying things like http://news.google.com and http://buzz.yahoo.com. You can also focus on inner pages in Wikipedia like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts if you find a promising looking term and want to delve deeper.

Another nice feature is to run your own affiliate sites through it, as it will pull up your own targeted keywords and related keywords and give you estimated CPCs for them, hopefully confirming that you’re on the right track and targeting profitable niches, as well as potentially new fodder for pages to create.