Start Data Science Blogging in 2020
By: Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.
Tags: Side Income, Blogging, Writing, Side Hustle, Data Science

How to Start with Blogging in Data Science

Start Data Science Blogging in 2020

Medium is now considered one of the most popular blogging sites. Medium is a platform specifically designed for writers and readers. The writing experience on Medium is simply amazing. The Medium website facilitates writing. Basically, everyone can become a medium writer, as long as you have something interesting that you would like to write about.

I joined Medium over a year ago. I published my first medium article Using sapply() function in R to generate a table on July 7, 2018. This article was written mostly for experimental purposes. The feeling of satisfaction that a writer derives when someone actually reads their work and post feedback and comments about their work is what encouraged me to keep writing.

It’s been 17 months since I published my first article on medium. Even since then, I have published prolifically on diverse areas covering a wide variety of topics such as sports analytics, materials sciences, physics, online education, and personal growth.

Launch your data science blogging career in 2020

If you have some basic data science knowledge, you can start blogging as soon as possible. You can write a data science blog on diverse topics such as:

a) Data wrangling

b) Data visualization

c) Machine learning

d) Technological tools in data science such as R, Python, SAS, SQL, Hadoop, etc.

e) Data science professional development

f) Data science interview process

g) Theoretical foundations of data science

Writing medium articles has 7 main advantages:

Writing is an intellectual activity. Writing challenges you to think outside the box. You have to constantly think of creative ideas that you can base your writing on. My writings cover data science broadly speaking, with emphasis on providing educational guidance to data science aspirants. It provides a means for you to showcase your knowledge and skills in data science. It motivates you to work on challenging data science projects, thereby improving your data science skills. It enables you to share your expertise, knowledge and experiences with readers across the entire globe. My data science articles are now viewed over 100,000 times each month by enthusiastic and passionate readers all across the globe. It enables you to improve your communication skills. This is useful because it enables you to convey information in a way that the general public can understand. The saying goes that “if you can’t explain something to someone in simple terms, then it means you don’t understand the concept well.” Every article published on Medium is considered intellectual property, so you can add a medium article to your resume. You can make money from your articles. By means of the Medium Partner Program, anyone who publishes on Medium can make their articles eligible for earning money.

As a successful writer, your number of views, reads, read ratio, fans, and earnings should grow at a decent rate over time. The plots below show my monthly views, reads, fans, and earnings for the 17 months following my joining Medium as a writer. As you publish high-quality articles prolifically and consistently, you will see your number of views, reads, fans, and earnings growth over time.

Tips for succeeding as a medium writer

Write prolifically. As you write prolifically, your articles will gain popularity over time, and this will translate into more views, reads, and fans. Write high quality curated articles. It’s good to write prolifically, but you want to make sure you are not prioritizing quantity over quality. Make sure each published article is of the high article. Choose a good featured image for your article. A captivating featured image will enhance the quality of your article and will increase the likelihood that your article will be viewed and read. When choosing a featured image, make sure you don’t violate any copyright rules. One way to avoid violating copyright rules would be to use images from unsplash or you can create your own images. For more guidance, see the following: Choose the Right Featured Image For Your Data Science Articles. Focus on one area. It’s good to focus your energy on one area instead of writing about several different topics. I focus my articles on data science education and data science as a profession. Be patient, success takes time. It takes time to build a reputation as a good writer. In my case, the first 12 months of writing were very tough, but I never gave up. I keep writing and writing and writing. I have seen my earnings rise from under $2/month to $900 per month. In the past 3 months, my average earning is $600/month. Keep the length of your articles to about 4 to 6 minutes read. Most readers will not have a lot of time to spend reading your articles, so It’s good to write short articles. Embed some code if possible. If you are writing a data science article, the quality of the article could be improved if you could embed some code into your article. See the following examples:

8. You can submit your data science article to medium publications that are focused on data science. The 2 top data science publications are Towards Data Science and Towards AI. Publishing in one of these publications will help your articles to receive more publicity.

Useful resources to get you started

Beginner’s Guide to Writing Data Science Blogs on Medium

Choose the Right Featured Image For Your Data Science Articles

How to Succeed as a Medium Writer — 2 Lessons from an Ancient Book