People commonly say that we should not bottle up feelings because it is unhealthy for our wellbeing. For me, my passion for data science is overflowing, and I am in need of an outlet.

The purpose of this article is to share my exploration journey, just like how we do Transfer Learning for machine learning problems.

“Do not waste time reinventing the wheel, learn from those who have done it before.” — JN

Writing data science articles has taught me to organise my thoughts and choose my words properly. It invokes curiosity, arouses emotions and triggers creativity amongst other expressive advantages.

My blogging journey

Around August 2019, I published a data science article on Medium.com. At that time I was quite satisfied with a peak article view by 70 users on the first day and around 20 views per day subsequently. I thought there must be a bigger data science community out there which I could reach out to.

I remember reading very good articles in the past somewhere, and started to dive into many different publications. After a month of exploration, I eventually became a writer for Towards Data Science and my first article was accepted on 05 October by the publication.

My jaw dropped when I saw the stats: 352 views in a day! That is a huge chunk of my cumulative views over the past month, accomplished in a day!

To a creator of any work, it is very rewarding to have the work seen and recognised. It is not a matter of pride or selfishness, we are psychologically programmed to need respect and affection from everyone around us. People yearn for

■ claps on Medium,

■ likes on Facebook,

■ shares on LinkedIn.

While it is comforting to be recognised, please do not rely upon it to prop up your self-esteem.

Example of another article

On 13 October, I published Locate V-beat in Electrocardiogram (ECG) using machine learning and image pre-processing.

The article was immediately featured on the homepage under the “Latest” section and yielded 372 views on that day. The reach came from internal Medium distribution, such as Medium homepage, app, emails, and social media accounts; alongside with other external references and search engines. The advantage of being part of Medium’s metered paywall is that curators can recommend my articles to interested readers.

Until today, I have published 5 articles on Towards Data Science, with 50 articles views daily on steady state (without any boosting or new articles injected). There is usually a small increase when I share or boost my articles on social media.

Tip: To boost article views, include related Hashtags which are trending, for example #customer and #healthtechnology, to be picked up by search engines.

Here comes the main course

If you are new to Medium, or would like to start to do some serious blogging for an accomplished publication, this 4-step section will show you how it can be done.

**1. Join the Medium Partner Program
**

Sign up for a Medium account and read this article for new writers. To join the Medium Partner Program, you can click on this link.

**2. Be an official writer for Towards Data Science
**

The esteemed publication has instructed in this article for aspiring writers to send an email to publication@towardsdatascience.com and include below items:

(a) a link to your article (Medium draft preferred, or published on Medium)

(b) a link to your LinkedIn profile

3. Set up a new Stripe account (https://stripe.com**)
**

Register a new Stripe account here. You have to link it to your local bank account, so that Stripe can transfer the money received from Medium to that bank account.

Tip: The service fee to pay Stripe is 3.4% + $0.50 per successful card charge. To reduce the frequency of incurring service fee, change the payout schedule setting to “monthly” for recurring payout sent automatically to your bank account.

After setting up, you can access your Stripe dashboard here.

**4. Set up Medium Partner Program dashboard
**

You need to do 2 things on the Medium Partner Program dashboard:

(a) to direct payment to Stripe, activate your Medium account via a ‘Submit’ button. After that you have to log in to your Stripe account to set it up to expect payment from new account “Medium”.

(b) to submit your taxpayer information before payment can be received. This has to be done within 1 month from joining the partner program or else your articles will cease to accumulate earnings; and earnings will be forfeited if not done within 180 days.

Tip: For non-USA residents, use the

W-8BEN Form

to submit Taxpayer information (3 simple steps).

After that you will receive an email from Medium that all is set up and done, so you can look forward to the residual income flowing into your bank account monthly.

These are 2 unavoidable things in life — death and taxes

From this month (November 2019) onwards, Medium has updated the way writer earnings are calculated. The major change is to use member’s reading time instead of article’s number of claps as the main signal. You can read more about it here.

Tip: Remember to click on the ‘3dots’ menu options before you publish your article

What else is cooking?

Apart from working on data science projects, my other hobby is doing problem solving on HackerRank to sharpen my skills.

my profile: https://www.hackerrank.com/jnyh1

Coding makes me a logical thinker, or rather being a logical thinker I could “speak the snake language” (Python) and empathise with how the computer thinks. You can read this in my next blog — Applying Statistics in Python - part I. Feel free to connect with me if you are like-minded and would like to discover solutions together.

“As iron sharpens iron, we can only get better!”

Thank you for reading!