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My name is Jill Murray. I’m a writer. I maintain a personal blog at JillMurray.com and through my business, Accomplice Media Inc., I write and create web strategies for clients like More Or Les, HKC Marketing and Torontoist.com.

In my blogging adventures, I’ve learned many strategies and methods for building good blogs and blogs that make money. While I love my personal blog, it’s a tough one to monetize because I essentially need to build a cult of personality around myself in order to build traffic and make my blog attractive to advertisers. While I’m sure millions of people are just waiting to adore me, I’d love to have a more practical platform on which to test everything I’ve learned. Enter the Exponential Blog Experiment.

I was inspired by Daren Rowse’s post on ProBlogger.net, Exponential Growth in Blogging – Getting Through the Early Days, which describes the exponential, leapfrogging patterns of blog growth that are typical to healthy and ambitious blogs, and explains how to set personal benchmarks for success.

What will happen, I wonder, if I set up a blog and every day, implement just one of my favourite strategies that the folks behind sites like ProBlogger.net, Performancing.com, SethGodin.com and CopyBlogger.com have so generously researched and shared?

This is Day One: Start A Blog. I’ve opted for the simplest method I know and set up a free account with WordPress.com– default template, no plugins– just the bare bones of blogging, one step at a time. It’s hard not to cheat and jump ahead to install an analytics package, create a killier template or email everyone I just linked to to let them know I’m talking about them. But rules are rules, and this is about taking things one day and one step at a time.

I hope you will join me on my journey and learn with me in real time as I test strategies, make mistakes and find out the easy way and the hard way, what makes blogs grow.