I get a lot of pitches via email, as a blogger. I get some pitches to me for my personal blog, some for this blog, some for my shopping blog, and even some for various other blogs for which I’m contracted to write. On very (un)lucky days I get the same pitch three or four times, to different emails, about different blogs. I’m inundated and I ignore most of it. It’s the working blogger’s equivalent of junk mail.

Lately I’ve started getting a lot of people magnanimously offering to allow me the honor of paying them to advertise my sites—either on their sites, in some magazine, etc. These I’m even more likely to turn down; why, exactly, would I pay to advertise writing that’s getting plenty of word-of-mouth coverage, already? I’m entirely too cheap for that.

But one day, circumstances converged and I decided to do a little experiment.

The thing is, I’ve recently gotten sucked into Facebook. I like Facebook, because it allows me to break up my busy day with Scrabble. Ahem. Anyway, I’d noticed that in the endless ads for Botox alternatives and IQ tests, there were some advertisements running for blogs. And I thought that was sort of interesting, so I did some research.

And then I put on my bargain ninja hat and found various ways to get myself some Facebook Ads credits. Like, um, about $300 worth of Facebook Ads credits.

Which meant… $300 of free advertising!

I set up my ad and got everything configured and it started to run. I saw a definite bump in traffic over at Want Not. I was very pleased, and also thought myself very clever. I was probably still patting myself on the back when the traffic dropped off, and a check of my Facebook Ad stats showed that impressions and clicks had dropped way off.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I don’t entirely understand how Facebook decides when to show your ad, based upon your “bid” amount, but I tinkered with it here and there, and basically discovered that any time I upped my bid amount, there would be a spike, and then it would drop off again.

I checked my account every day, and settled on a bid that was bringing me a few extra hits and only costing a few bucks a day. And after a few weeks, I stopped checking my account.

You know what’s coming, right?

I haven’t changed anything, but somehow over the last week my clicks went waaaaay up again, and I burned through the rest of my free credits. And then this morning when I checked my email I was greeted by a bill from Facebook Ads for about $50. Oops.

Hey, lesson learned. And it’s not like that $50 is going to break the bank. But am I feeling incredibly stupid? I’m going to have to refrain from answering that question on the grounds that I might incriminate my idiot self.