Thanks for the resteem. In your situation, I honestly think the most important things for you is to enter contests (where you can earn coins or resteems), comment a lot so that people see your quality writing and decide to follow you (as I just did), and go ahead and use that 3 SBD for bots!

Yes, some people have issues with bots. But you know, some people on Facebook have an issue with boosting posts too. There will always be purists who think that anything you do to pay to play is somehow a diminishment. I find that those people are either really early adopters who have first mover's advantage, so don't need the help of advertising, or they're people who aren't doing as well as they could but are happy with that just on principle.

I personally have no problem with the idea that I have to invest in something I care about if I expect to succeed. I see nothing unethical about advertising at all. Put just 1 SBD into every other post of yours for the next week (assuming you write one post per day), so that by the end of the week your payout reimburses you, and all you'll have done is increase the number of people seeing your posts. You'll have to use the bots wisely to even break even on SBD from the bot's upvote, so it's not like paying $1 to make $2 immediately.

(btw, you seriously need to put up a profile pic and preferably also an "about" sentence if you want more people to follow you.)