7/25/18 7/25/18

How Blogging Helps You Build a Community in Data Science

Holy Moly. I started blogging in March and it has opened my eyes.I want to start off by saying that I didn't magically come up with this idea of blogging on my own. I noticed my friend Jonathan Nolis becoming active on LinkedIn, so I texted them to get the scoop. They told me to start a blog and jokingly said "I'm working on my #brand". I'm the type of person to try anything once, plus I already owned a domain name, had a website builder (from working at Vistaprint), and I have an email marketing account (because I work for Constant Contact). So sure, why not? If you're thinking about starting a blog. Know that you do not need to have a bunch of tools already at your disposal. If needed, you can create articles on LinkedIn or Medium. There are many options to try before investing a penny . . . but of course, you can go ahead and create your own site.

I have since moved to self-hosted Wordpress. I've fallen in love with blogging, and Wordpress lets me take advantage of lots of extra functionality.With my first post, my eyes started to open up to all the things that other members of the Data Science community were doing. And honestly, if you had asked me about who I most looked up to in Data Science prior to starting my blog, I'd probably just rattle off people who have created R packages that have made my life easier, or people who post a lot of answers to questions on Stack Overflow. But now I was paying attention on LinkedIn and Twitter, and seeing the information that big data science influencers like Kirk Borne, Carla Gentry, Bernard Marr, and many others (seriously, so many others) were adding to the community.

I also started to see first hand the amount of people that were studying to become a data scientist (yay!). Even people who are still in school or very early in their careers are participating by being active in the data science community. (You don't need to be a pro, just hop in). If you're looking for great courses to take in data science, these ones have been highly recommended by the community here.I've paid attention to my blog stats (of course, I'm a data nerd), and have found that the articles that I write that get the biggest response are either:

Articles on how to get into data science
Coding demos on how to perform areas of data science

But you may find that something different works for you and your style of writing. I don't just post my articles on LinkedIn. I also post on Twitter, Medium, I send them to my email list, and I put them on Pinterest. I balked when someone first mentioned the idea of Pinterest for data science articles. It's crazy, but Pinterest is the largest referrer of traffic to my site. Google Analytics isn't lying to me.

I've chatted with so many people in LinkedIn messaging, I've had the opportunity to speak with and (virtually) meet some awesome people who are loving data and creating content around data science. I'm honestly building relationships and contributing to a community, it feels great. If you're new to the "getting active in the data science community on LinkedIn" follow Tarry Singh, Randy Lao, Kate Strachnyi, Favio Vazquez, Beau Walker, Eric Weber, and Sarah Nooravi just to name a few. You'll quickly find your tribe if you put yourself out there. I find that when I participate, I get back so much more than I've put in.Hitting "post" for the very first time on content you've created is intimidating, I'm not saying that this will be the easiest thing you ever do. But you will build relationships and even friendships of real value with people who have the same passion. If you start a blog, I look forward to reading your articles and watching your journey.