The Importance of Blogging as a Data Scientist
Data Sharing and How blogging can benefit your scientific career!
Aside from being able to educate others, blogging is also a really great way to reinforce knowledge, build your brand, earn money, amongst other things. Most data scientist shy away from blogging because they think they are not smart enough or they don’t think it is important.
Importance of Blogging as a Data Scientist
As someone who has been into tech blogging for quite some time, I will be sharing some reasons why blogging is important for data scientists. If you’ve ever wondered why data scientists should blog, then this blogpost was written with you in mind. I do hope you learn a thing or two from it.
Now let’s get right into it.
1. It can help you to give back to the Data Community
When you started learning data science, you most likely read a couple of tech articles to grasp that programming languages needed for data science like Python, R, SQL.
You know what? Let’s scratch that. You still read tech articles now that you are no longer a data newbie.
If the assumption I made above is correct, that means you’ve benefited from at least 1 tech blogger in the data community at some point in your career. So, why not write to help another data scientist too?
There’s a high chance that this might not seem like an excellent reason for you to start blogging but try to imagine those articles that helped you out were not written by the authors and ask yourself if you would’ve been able to understand those tech concepts at the time.
Blogging gives you an opportunity to give back to the community, to help someone understand data science, and to inspire others.
2. It can help you to Improve your skills
Over the years, I have noticed that people think tech blogging is only about educating others. But that’s not true. I believe blogging actually helps the author as much as it helps the reader.
Truth be told, most tech bloggers actually research the tech concepts days or weeks before writing a blogpost about it on their blog. Because of this research carried out by tech bloggers, their knowledge about everything they write about keeps improving. For instance, if I write about Machine Learning or Data Viz consistently for a year, I will be way better at ML than I was the previous year when I didn’t write anything about it.
So, what exactly am I saying?
Blogging helps to educate others, but it will help you learn about new things and improve your data knowledge and communication skills.
3. It helps you to Build your Brand
At first, it may seem like nobody is watching or noticing your blogposts. But over time, people will get to know you for the type of data science articles you write. And that, my friend, is a good way to build your brand.
Blogging about a certain programming language or data science concept consecutively will make you known in that respective Data Science Community. This can lead to recommendations, opportunities, job offers, and so much more.
When recruiters see your blog posts, it can also increase your chances of getting the job over others who don’t write technical articles because it shows them you are really knowledgeable about the subject matter and you also have good communication skills.
I mean, who doesn’t love a data Scientist with strong communication skills?
4. It can helps you to make Extra Money
Oh yes, you can make money from blogging. In fact, it is such a good way to make a passive income even while working as a full-time data scientist.
Listed below are some ways to make money while blogging as a data scientist;
- Ads: Adding ads to your blog is one of the most popular ways to make money through tech blogging.
- Web monetization: If you are not a fan of ads, you can integrate Web Monetization on your blog.
- Paid freelance jobs: Offer your services to businesses as a freelance data analyst, ml engineer or data scientist.
- Paid community writing programs: Multiple solicitations found their way to my inbox from editors asking to pay me to write blogs on data for their big-name websites. There are tons of tech companies and communities that pay to write technical articles for them. Most of them pay between 100 to 2000 dollars.
- Affiliate links: You can add affiliate links from various tech companies on your blog posts.
- Community funding: Getting community funding is also another way to make money as a tech blogger. With a Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee account, various people in the data community can support you financially monthly.
Full Disclosure
Blogging is a combination of sharing & gaining knowledge. It can help you achieve great things & get better as a data scientist.
My final words would be to remind you that tech bloggers have the great benefit of becoming lifelong learners because they need to be well-versed in the field they are writing to explain the concepts to readers clearly. So when you blog, you also help yourself too.
If you now see why you should start blogging and want to get started, I’d recommend this to follow this blogpost how to start a tech blog, I wrote something years back.
Do you know of any other benefits of blogging as a data scientist? Please share it in the comment section below, and I’ll reply to every comment.
Thank you and Stay tuned for more!!