A portfolio is the single most important thing to become a data analyst. Your portfolio represents you, and it's the first thing any recruiter sees lacking. A good portfolio will stop you from getting a job and becoming a data analyst. So let's fix this. I'll show you exactly how to create a perfect portfolio as a beginner for free, and it takes about 15 minutes to set up. And I just cannot believe how simple this is. This portfolio is amazing and the only one you need. But a portfolio is only as good as the projects that you put in it. Therefore, I'll show you some great portfolio projects that you can do as a beginner and put right in your portfolio as well. Let's get started. A portfolio is basically a collection of different projects that you've made these showcase to employers, usually on a website. Starting out with the different types of portfolios. GitHub is a very popular website where you can upload called your projects and other stuff. When you get started and data, you'll quickly discover another website called Kaggle. It's a community specifically for data science. You can create a free account and upload your projects and called to Kaggle and from there you can just grab a link to your project and share this link. This is a great first step for beginners because you don't even need a portfolio. You can just upload them, share the link, and you're done. But honestly, that is not enough to build a real portfolio that actually gets you a job. You're going to need a personal portfolio on your own website. It's actually super simple and completely free. So let's get started. First, we need a website. If you're into web development, you can, of course, make this website yourself. But this method, it will not require any coding. We're going to make it as simple as possible. We're going to be doing this for free on Wix, which is a website builder. The only thing you need is an account and you can sign up for free by clicking this button. You'll fill in some basic information and then you can just get started. Now we're creating a portfolio, so let's type portfolio. I recommend that you put developer portfolio to get some good recommendations. They don't have any specific data analyst portfolios, but that is not a problem. We're going to be customizing it in about 5 minutes. Once you create your account, you'll get to this dashboard screen. You don't need to worry about anything here. The free plan works just fine for what we're going to be doing. Now, let's click on site and app and then website. Now we're going to select a template and these templates are free and super easy to use. You can browse around and find tens, if not hundreds of portfolio templates. For this example, I'm just going to select the creative CV template because I think it's a really good one for beginners with just a couple of projects and it's super simple to set up. This is the template. Now we have this main page and then you can click to access the resume, the project or the contact page. They're all on separate pages, but we're going to click on edit this site to make this portfolio our own. Now we're ready to customize our portfolio. I'm going to put my name there. And what I like about this portfolio template is that it already has some information. All you really have to do is write a quick summary and replace the social media links. Then the main page is pretty much done. If you click on the site menu, you'll see different pages, resume project and more, and uploading your resume is of course optional. You can also just remove that page or any page that you don't want to use in your portfolio. Now, in this case, we're going to head over to projects right away, and this is where the magic happens. My first piece of advice is to avoid overcomplicating this project section. It's super simple. Just summarize your projects in a couple of lines. You can start like I built a data Martin sequel to blah blah blah. This is a good summary of the project in general, and then you'll want to put an image that represents your project here on the side as a D down a list. We all know that the visuals are really important and this is an opportunity for you to shine. This can be one of your visualizations from the project or anything that makes it look cool and it's relevant for the project. Of course, here is a really good example from Yann Holds Portfolio about what kind of images you might want to add for your project. Now of course, he's very advanced, so they don't have to be this complicated, but think of it kind of like a front page to a magazine. Next, you'll finally want to add a link to the full project on Kaggle. Either as a button or something or just a direct link. This is awesome because you've summarized the project in a couple of lines, and if people want to get all the details, they could just click and get everything on Kaggle or GitHub, where you upload the full project. You really don't need to upload any code or anything to your website. Just keep it super simple. A portfolio like this is really helpful for recruiters because they don't have the time to browse through long projects. So a summary like this in your portfolio is really, really important. Now, again, as a beginner, I recommend just starting out with 2 to 4 quality projects in your portfolio. Focus on quality over quantity, because these projects should really highlight your skills, not just be a random collection of things you've done that doesn't really serve any purpose. Now we're actually almost done with our portfolio, published a website and boom, you have your first portfolio set up for free. But wait a second, we do need some projects. Before we get to that, let's talk about a domain. So an optional thing is getting a domain. For example, I use the domain, learn with Luc is dot com for my website. Now you can get a domain for as little as ten bucks and you don't need to buy one. It's totally fine to just use the free domain from Wix, but if you want a domain, I recommend using name cheap. Name cheap. Have a lot of domains that you could just buy really quick and just type in whatever name you want. For example, your name John Smith. Smith This one will cost you about $10 per year, so less than $1 per month. And I think that's a pretty good deal for a domain. But again, you don't really need a domain. It's completely optional. It works really good to just use the basic wix domain. Now you're probably wondering, Lucas, but I still don't have any projects to put in my portfolio, so let's make some awesome portfolio projects. I know that many people say do projects that align with your interest that you're passionate about, and that is true. I say this myself, but I don't think that's helpful enough in this case. So I've decided to put together some project ideas that are amazing for your portfolio. Project one Movie ratings for the first project. I'm going to keep it really simple. Now, I call this project Movie Ratings and Trends because we're going to be working with a movie dataset and I recommend using this one from Kaggle. It's free to use and it's called IMDB movies. All you need is a Kaggle account and then you can just download it for free. This dataset is not the largest, so you don't really need to work with a specific tool. But I highly recommend using sequel. It's always a very good option. First, clean and structure the data. I'm not going to go into this now, but if you want a full of video on either of these projects, then let me know. The next step is to explore the data. Now we need questions to answer. You can use pre-made questions or make them up yourself for a more personal project. Some easy questions are which actor prefers a specific genre and what genre brings in the most revenue. This might be useful for a film production company looking to make a new movie. Then you'll want to grab a visualization tool to showcase your findings, and you could create graphs in Tableau or Power by showing through events. Over time, you could create some charts comparing the average rating of different genres or something pretty cool is to use a scatterplot and show kids different correlations. For example, between movie length and reading. Basically, you can try to find any sort of connection between movie length and reading, and that might be very useful for the film production companies to consider. If you are really struggling with what questions to answer, you can even use it to generate some questions about this data set for you. Simply put in the different columns and any information and the air will give you some relevant questions. It's actually really simple. It is also important to document your procedure and your findings because this is going to show that you have a greater understanding of the complete data analysis process. This project is an end to end project, and the main goal is to showcase your ability to find data, organize it, analyze it, and produce actionable insights from scratch. This is the core of what data analysis is all about. And as you should know at this point, the job of data analyst is not actually to work with data. It's to make data useful to companies to help with data driven decisions moving over to project number two, and I'll just go through another project idea while we're at it. So this one is called online retail sales. This is very similar to the previous project. Describe an appropriate data set, for example, from Kaggle. I recommend this one. It's a great data set and pretty easy to work with for this project. I would still use the call because companies love it. Any SQL project will strengthen your portfolio significantly. All you have to do is just download the data set, and the objective here is to analyze online retail sales and draw conclusions from this data. Some of the questions that you could ask yourself are which products generate the most revenue? Are there customers who make repeat purchases? And if so, how often? On average, you could also ask, are the products are frequently bought together? And finally, you can try to visualize sales data on the map to highlight which regions generate the most revenue in sales. These questions should help you get started, and it really doesn't have to be complicated at all. Once you have your project, just head over to Kaggle or it gets up. In my case, I'll be using Kaggle because I prefer it pulls to code documentation and any information and publish your project. Then just make a brief summary on your website. Like we talked about, it is absolutely crucial that you focus on the project first and then once you have at least two good projects, you can start working on your portfolio. Don't worry about the portfolio when you get started. Good projects will make up 90% of your success. Another tip is that you can upload your projects to LinkedIn as well. All you have to do is click on Add Profile section and then you'll find an option to add projects to your LinkedIn profile. It's the same thing here. Just put a quick summary and then link to the actual project on Kaggle. I just wanted to throw this in here because I don't see that many people using this amazing feature on LinkedIn. Now you know how to build a personal portfolio as a beginner, but I still have so much more to show you. So check out this video next for more. Have an amazing week, guys. Subscribe and take care.