Growing Your Creative Business Through Instagram

Cat Coquillette teaches this course from the inside of her own business, and it shows in the specificity of the advice. She built her painting and illustration brand largely on Instagram, and rather than offering generic platform tips, she walks through the exact adjustments that took her from an audience of fellow artists to one of paying customers. That distinction, drawn out early in the "Getting Noticed" lesson, is the spine of the whole course: content and hashtags aimed only at people who make the same kind of work will never buy it, so the account needs a second, parallel strategy aimed at buyers.

What the course actually covers

The early lessons cover account mechanics (personal versus business versus creator profiles, what Instagram Insights unlocks) before moving into content strategy. The photographing lesson is the most technically useful for a certain kind of student: it is aimed squarely at painters, illustrators, and other hands-on creators who need to shoot physical work well using a phone camera, natural light, and simple props like greenery or gems, rather than a general photography lesson. The captions lesson is built around seven templates with real examples pulled from her own feed, including one where she paired a sloth painting with a Thanksgiving joke and one that turned a Target licensing deal into a caption worth sharing. These are specific enough to copy directly.

The Stories lesson walks through an entire posting sequence step by step: opening the camera roll, applying text and a color-matched background, adding a GIF sticker, and embedding a swipe-up shop link with a call-to-action GIF underneath it. It is a genuinely useful screen-recording-style walkthrough, though the swipe-up link mechanic it centers on was retired by Instagram in favor of a link sticker not long after the course's original release, so a viewer following along today has to mentally substitute the newer feature.

Where it holds up and where it shows its age

The driving-sales and hashtag-strategy sections hold up well because they describe a mindset rather than a specific interface: appeal to the algorithm by rewarding engagement, appeal to buyers by making purchase intent obvious in the content itself. The bonus lesson on common mistakes, covering vague bios, buying followers, and copying other artists, is short but blunt and useful as a final checklist.

What limits the course is scope. It has nothing on Reels, which now drives the bulk of organic reach on the platform, and its scheduling advice centers on Planoly used purely as a visual planning board rather than any of the automated posting tools now common. The 87 minutes are efficient and rarely padded, but a viewer expecting current algorithm mechanics will need to supplement this with newer material. As a grounding in the sales-first mindset behind a creative Instagram account, though, it delivers exactly what it promises.

What you will learn

• ·How to reach paying customers instead of only fellow artists by mixing niche and buyer-facing hashtags
• ·How to write captions that drive engagement using seven concrete formats, from origin stories to hard promotion
• ·How to photograph analog artwork with just a phone using natural light and staged props
• ·How to build Instagram Stories with swipe-up links, GIF stickers and clear calls to action
• ·How to choose between personal, business and creator accounts and use Insights analytics
• ·How to batch-plan a cohesive grid using a third-party scheduling tool without automating actual posts