What would you say if I told there was a slimy one eyed monster living somewhere deep inside the internet, with the power to propel masses of traffic to your blog, known to a few but hidden to the majority? You’d probably think I had spent too much time playing Super Mario Galaxy on my wife’s new Nintendo Wii and had just been woken up having fallen asleep at the controls. Actually, given the level of addiction that particular game generates that’s not such an implausible situation.

But this is no dream, it’s a cast iron reality.

Squidoo, Seth Godin’s user generated empire, has been around for a few years now but is often overlooked by even the most seasoned bloggers. When used correctly it can drive masses of traffic to your blog, especially when the pages you create, lenses as they are known on Squidoo, show up on the front page of google search results for your chosen key words.

Here’s how it works. You open a Squidoo account and then create a lens. A lens is simply a user created page on which you can add your own content along with links to your existing blog, or anything else you want to draw attention to. Describe your lens with keywords, give it a keyword rich title and then sit back and wait for it show up towards the top of Google’s search results for the keywords you have chosen. Squidoo has so much authority in the eyes of Google that it’s pages are ranked highly and indexed quickly. And that means that anything you have linked in your lens receives high ranking links and all the traffic that they can bring.

The Squidoo Answer Deck Headquarters is the best place to start, with answers to all the usual questions, getting started guides and all sorts of helpful advice. Squidoo’s playful terminology makes it a little hard to penetrate at first, but after you’ve got used to it’s unique way of doing things everything becomes very clear.

If you have a blog it’s a potentially unlimited source of traffic since the more lenses you create the more exposure your links will have.

Try it. It’s free. And it works.