Decided to try my hand at Squidoo. Word is that it indexes as least as well as Ezine Articles, approves instantly and doesn't give you grief about affiliate links. That means they can be used as both landing pages (what US Free Ads charges $9 a month for) and articles linking to pages with affiliate links.

I had an article ready to go, so I followed Squidoo's instructions and pasted in all the type. It looked awful, with gigantic gaps between each module. Maybe this wasn't going to be such a good deal after all--would EVERYTHING I wrote for Squidoo require pictures?

My second article was more amenable to being illustrated, so I posted pictures in each module. But the gaps due to not having module titles still remained. Fortunately, I remembered two things I've been told about overcoming obstacles. One was from an advertising executive I met a long time ago: "Obstacles are your friends. They should be embraced and challenged, not avoided and feared."  The other was from an e-mail Travis "The Bum Marketer" Sago sent me a few days ago: "Unleash HELL on ANY obstacle that DARES to stand in your way!"

Contradictory sentiments? Not at all--the way to unleash hell on my Squidoo obstacle was to 1) realize that I, not they, had created it; and 2) work with Squidoo's features rather than against them. In other words, I had to stop looking at my articles for Squidoo AS articles because they WEREN'T articles--they were Squidoo lenses!

With that change in attitude, I went back over my article and pulled out phrases that could work as subheads. Not only did the page look better, I was able to set up the narrative flow of the lens by employing the Squidoo table of contents feature. Then I went back to my first Squidoo and did the same. It's still all-text, but with the colored headlines, it looks MUCH better now.

I'm very pleased that I was able to rescue myself from being too rigid in my thinking. And thanks to Squidoo, we can now tell the article web sites that don't accept affiliate links that they can kiss our niches!