How to Start a Data Science Blog on Medium | by Haden Pelletier | Dec, 2024 – Towards Data Science

Tips on how to get started, write your first article, and get noticed

There are so many benefits to having a data science blog on Medium.

I initially started it as a way to build a portfolio of sorts for employers to look at when I applied to jobs, but it’s become so much more for me.

Writing on Medium has allowed me to:

• Build community with other data scientists
• Grow my connections on LinkedIn and network
• Earn some extra money each month
• Solidify concepts that I’m learning about through teaching others

One of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to getting started is knowing what you should write about. What will your niche be? What will your first article be about?

Why data science?

On Medium, you can write about pretty much anything. It’s such a cool platform because it’s extremely user friendly, has a very affordable membership fee (which you can easily make back each month by writing), and it’s so effortless to set up an account and start writing right away.

Data science, AI, machine learning, and any other tech related buzzword you can think of, is a very profitable niche.

The PYPL index (Popularity of Programming Language Index) uses Google Trends to estimate a language’s popularity by tracking the number of tutorials that are searched for it over time.

As of December 2024, Python is ranked #1 on this index.

One of the main reasons I discovered Medium in the first place is because anytime I would google how to do something for my job, a Medium article would pop up.

Data science publications like Towards Data Science and Towards AI are growing rapidly, with 780K and 66K followers respectively.

The topics Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Python have over 22 million followers combined.

Nowadays I average between $20–30 per article I write and have even made upwards of $400 total on a single article.

What to write

Use your 9–5 to get inspiration. If you aren’t working yet, use whatever university course or certification you’re enrolled in. Each time you:

• Learn something new
• Start or complete a project
• Teach someone else how to do something
• Find a better way to accomplish a task

Write about it.

Showcase personal projects you’ve worked on, write tutorials about things you recently learned that were difficult to understand or give your opinion about the latest LLM.

Here are a few different types of articles that I’ve written and that I’ve seen throughout my time writing here:

• Tutorials — Teach your reader how to do some data science task step by step. Example: How to: Handle Missing Data for Time Series
• Career Tips/Advice — Give insight into the field of data science. Provide tips related to job hunting, resumes, interviewing, or being promoted. Example: Your First Year as a Data Scientist: A Survival Guide
• Programming Hacks — Show people ways they can improve their programs or scripts. These kinds of articles are typically lists or contain multiple tips with examples. Example: 5 Python One-Liners to Kick Off Your Data Exploration
• Concept Explanations — These kinds of articles go over and cover a broad data science or ML concept, such as the machine learning life cycle, MLOps, or neural networks. They may or may not contain mini tutorials within them, but for the most part just give a broad overview of a concept. Example: Every Step of the Machine Learning Life Cycle Simply Explained

Titles

Titles and subtitles will make a big difference in how much engagement your articles get and how many people they reach.

In the data science space, there are certain kinds of titles that tend to do well.

• “How to”: This title doesn’t just work well for tutorials. It also works for pretty much any other type of article. Example: “How to Network as a Data Scientist”
• Numbers: People love numbers, especially in this niche. They love quantifiable information and they want to know what to expect when they click on your article. If you promise to provide information on “3 Challenges to Being a Data Scientist in 2024”, this peaks curiosity and makes them want to read through the whole article to discover what those 3 challenges are.
• “Simply Explained”: Readers on Medium want fast, simple and easy explanations for complex concepts. Example: “Feature Importances Simply Explained”

It’s also important to run your own experiments. Try out different title formats and see which ones get the most reads and engagement.

Content

Of course, the title is only the beginning. Once a user clicks, you have to keep them engaged.

You can do this by:

• Including pictures, diagrams and code snippets throughout your article
• Using headings and subheadings to break up your article
• Spacing out your text blocks and paragraphs
• Cutting fluff and getting straight to the point. Introductions are good but when people are looking for tutorials and other technical information, they typically want less fluff and more real content.

Find a publication

When you first start out on Medium, the fastest and easiest way to get readers and engagement is to write for a publication.

When you first start you will have 0 followers, whereas a publication like Towards Data Science will have hundreds of thousands. That is hundreds of thousands more people who can potentially discover and read your work.

Many large publications also have large followings on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter/X. Towards Data Science always shouts out my articles when I publish them on their other social media platforms which brings even more traffic to the site.

As a writer you can join and write for multiple publications, but it’s best to pick a couple larger ones and focus most of your energy on writing for those. Here are some popular data science and programming publications that you can check out:

• Towards Data Science (780K followers)
• Towards AI (66K followers)
• Level Up Coding (180K followers)
• Python In Plain English (34K followers)

Each publication has their own guidelines when it comes to submitting articles, and each publication also has its own rules as to what kind of content they will actually publish.

The best way to find out how to submit an article is to go to the publication’s page in your desktop browser and look for a tab that says something like “Write for Us” “Submit” or “Contribute”. There, you can read more about how the submission process works as well as their guidelines for content.

Once your first article has been accepted and you’ve been added as a writer, you can just submit your next article for them directly through Medium when you hit “Publish”. Your articles will still need to be approved by a publication editor, though, so they won’t appear on the publication’s page immediately.

Finally — Read, read, read

I’ve had a few people ask me what my #1 tip is when it comes to becoming a better writer on Medium.

The key is to spend more time reading than you do writing.

Follow people you admire who have a lot of content published, people who have large followings and people who are growing rapidly. Read their articles, bookmark ones that you found intriguing or that did particularly well/had high engagement, and look for trends and patterns.

The more you read, the more you’ll get an idea of what you want to write and what will do well. You can adopt successful writing styles and techniques into your own.

Reading others’ work can also inspire you with article ideas, whether it be giving your own spin on what they wrote or writing about something similar.

Thanks for reading

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