Instagram Marketing 2026: Hashtags, Live, Stories, Ads &more (Udemy.com)
Watch me take an account from an idea to 40k followers in 4 months. 14 hours instruction, 8 hours of BTS videos
Created by: Evan Kimbrell
Last updated May 2026
What you will learn
- Learn how to create a successful themed, business, or personal account on Instagram
- Be able to pick an effective name for their account
- Understand the platform specific and growth marketing jargon associated with Instagram
- Create an attractive logo and further optimize their profile bio, name, & call to actions.
- Use and operate analytics tools like Iconosquare & HypeAuditor
- Analyze and understand why content on other accounts work
- Design a cost & time effective content strategy that works for long term growth
- Research and network with other competitor accounts in their space
- Create their own first batch of high quality content optimized for attention on Instagram
- Find the best images for use on Instagram and prevent copyright complications
- Use scheduling tools like Buffer & Later to better control & manage their future posts
- Use Photoshop to create custom images
Course Description
Join the over 8,900 students that have joined this course in the first 4 days of being live!
This course was recently featured in Entrepreneur Magazine.
This is the most comprehensive course on Instagram Marketing anywhere.
With over 23 hours of video and 165+ custom resources & guides, you won’t find a more thorough and up to date course out there.
We cover everything you need to know to start from scratch and grow an account to 20k, 40k, even 100k followers.
This course is for both beginners to Instagram and more advanced students that have some experience with the platform.
We’ll first start by teaching the basics of:
• Setting up and optimizing an account
• Developing a content strategy
• Creating your first batch of content
• Learning how to post & how to optimize hashtags
After that, we’ll start exploring intermediate growth strategies like:
• Shoutouts
• Bots & automated systems
• Top post targeted hashtags
After we establish a consistent system for growing our audience we’ll start diving into advanced concepts:
• Hiring low-cost content producers and designing a production system
• Introducing automation into content production, posting, and even outreach
• Using stories to increase engagement through your feed and expand your reach
• Designing an Instagram Live strategy to consistently create spikes in follows
• Creating zombie accounts that help drive traffic to your main account
• Design effective Instagram ads and how to incorporate them into your overall growth strategy
• How to run competitions to grow engagement and follows.
And much much more!
This course is designed to apply to both individuals that want to grow a following for themselves, but also businesses that want to start a presence on the platform and use it to grow their brand.
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Are you tired of courses that just repeat information you could have found on a blog or YouTube? Or maybe you’ve been stuck with instructors that TELL you what to do but have no idea what it takes to really accomplish what they’re teaching?
In this course, we don’t just TALK the TALK. We will actually DO what we are teaching.
Follow along as we take an account from complete scratch to 47,000 followers.
UPDATE: The account currently has 141,000 followers!
We start from the absolute beginning with conceptualizing the account, and we end with a well-defined content strategy, over 700 posts, and have even started to generate revenue with our account.
@innovationstation < check it out
No fake followers, no boosted posts, & no cheating. 47,000 REAL followers with an average engagement rate over 7%. Our account is growing by over 300+ followers a day, using the strategies taught in this course.
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Beware other Instagram courses are outdated, shallow, and taught by instructors who have never grown an account themselves.
Outdated: Instagram changes its system, its features, and its algorithm at least 3 times a year. That means if your instructor filmed their course in 2015, they’ve missed at least 9 different cycles! Their advice is not only out-dated, but it’s also worthless.
Shallow: Instagram is a huge opportunity and a very complicated product. Anyone who tells you that you can “master Instagram” in 4 hours simply is not telling the truth. It’s not enough to just SHOW you how to add a hashtag. You have to understand how they work, how to track them, and how you can apply a comprehensive strategy to your posts to stay ahead of the game.
Your Instructor:
Evan Kimbrell is in the top 1% of Udemy instructors with over 30 courses on Entrepreneurship & Marketing. His courses have over 630,000 students, 35,000+ 5 star reviews, and have been covered in publications such as TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Buzzfeed.
Instructor Details
- 4.5 Rating
10,366 Reviews
Evan Kimbrell
Hi, I'm Evan Kimbrell. Thanks for checking out my course.
**My courses have been featured in Forbes, CNN, Entrepreneur Magazine, BusinessInsider, BuzzFeed, Mashable, TheNextWeb, The Daily Beast, & Techcrunch**
Currently, I'm the Founder and Director of Sprintkick, a full-service, referral-only digital agency based out of San Francisco. Over the past four years I've overseen the development and launch of over 100 web and mobile apps. Clients range from two-man bootstrapping startups to multibillion dollar Fortune 100s like Wal-Mart, Dick's Sporting Goods, and GNC.
Prior to Sprintkick I worked as a VC for a new firm called Juvo Capital, based out of L.A. I spearheaded the firm's expansion into Silicon Valley and into the Consumer Web tech category.
In the long long ago, I was a co-founder for an educational software startup called ScholarPRO that raised a ton of money and then spectacularly blew up (in the bad way). Before it exploded like the Death Star, I went through five tech incubators (yes, five): Tech Stars, Excelerate Labs, MassChallenge, Babson Venture Program, and Sparkseed.
Hope you enjoy my courses!
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Reviews
By Charmaine Tang on 10/25/2025
The title says 2025 but it clearly is an outdated course. He said that stories are relatively new thing that started in 2016..... I guess if you don't have much experience with instagram, this course does provide some good info. But then why not take a course that is more up to date?
By Jr Barajas on 11/13/2020
I really liked the course and liked how I really did not have to take notes due to the cause that he includes cheat sheets and handouts in his teachings in pdf form. I plan on teaching my courses in the same manner system. Give out handouts and cheat sheets is very good in my opinion and makes the course more valueable. God bless you buddy boy...........
By Aditya Bhatnagar on 7/6/2020
In-depth course on Instagram. Recommend it to all who want to learn more about this social media platform. Personally I would recommend that the creators of the course to be more thorough with the subtitles/captions which are incorrect and also have no punctuation marks whatsoever.
By Hridansh Saraogi on 6/24/2020
I do not think I could have asked for anything else! This course was just beyond expectations - Initially when I was registering, I was not sure what I was going to get into and I felt it was just going to reinforce the basic ideas which I already knew but instead, Evan takes everything from the basics all the way to the advanced level, showing you every step and everything, I do not think he could have done it any better. Some part of me wants to jump right in and sign up for all 20 of his courses! This course was just perfect and it touched my interests very well; it was not just Instagram marketing, I feel it lent me an insight into a lot of other types of social media platforms and it got me equipped to understand concepts such as bots, zombies, etc. Even Evan's resources are brilliant. This was a wonderful course and I would highly recommend it!
By James Canavan on 1/3/2020
I used this course to promote my own account @notsymbol from the very beginning. At the start I knew NOTHING about Instagram and Evan did a FANSTASIC job holding my hand and showing all the details that got me up and running. I ended up building my posts and automating on Later. So the course was exactly what I needed. The course goes into a lot of extra tools that you might or might not need; but, I found that being aware of these tactics helps in understanding the platform. The pace of the course is as slow or as fast as I needed and it took me a good week to work through all the videos. I only skipped ONE video that was about making videos with Adobe Premier Pro as I knew this tool anyway. But, other than that I watched all videos right to the end. I wanted to get the full experience of the course. THERE is so much to this course. It is definitely worth the price; especially since I was starting off from the beginning. Thank you Evan for a good course on Instagram. Well done.
By Dinipre Chigozie Adimibe on 9/19/2019
Hi I'm Bobby from Nigeria and taking this course is one of the best decisions I have made in 2019. I have always been interested in Instagram and building a better Instagram presence online and this course has opened my eyes to world of possibilities. I've learnt so much these past months and have discovered new ways of getting stuff done in a way that is organised and in a way that pleases the 'Almighty' Instagram algorithm. I learnt about apps that could help make my work easier like Latergram and Canva and Jarvee, etc. The course is so well curated, simplistic, anyone can become an Instagram guru with practice and consistency. Thanks Evan for this course. It really was helpful. I'm not really sure why I gave it a 4.5 rating, should be more, but well... It's Ahhhmazing!
By Jon Brown on 3/25/2019
there is a lot here. the best thing I can say about this course is that after going through the course I feel like I finally understand instagram. I'll report back if I can't grow my instagram up to 40k. So far things are going well. There isn't much I dislike. Note there are some gray hat strategies which I appreciate. I enjoyed the instructor. He stays focused. delivers quality video. No annoying sounds or pauses.
By Harvey Botero on 2/13/2019
although some video quality is bad, the contents are useful and pretty understandable, I like it shows the amount of money you have to invest to get the results he gets
By Vanja Rubeša on 1/3/2019
I absolutely loved this course and learned so much from it so I would highly recomend it. Evan organized the lectures very precisely and everything in total is really well put together. His teaching style is professionall yet amusing, I like his sarcastic humor at times. This course helped me learn about Instagram everything I need to know, and a lot more, for business purposes. Thank you Evan!
By Farrukh Shafiq on 12/9/2018
Just watched 6% and it's so far so good.Everything makes sense.Hope it goes the same way till end. Updated review after 50% course completion : Exactly what i was searching for long time. Each and everything explained.But how to digest this very very long course ??? At last the course complete and it was beyond expectations. Every thing touched, such a comprehensive course.. I become found of " hey guyyysss welcome baackk " . A pro teacher. Want to follow each aspect under your guidance Evan sir. I am still wondrous udemy has such a strong course. Thank you very much for the excellent course Sir Evan Kimbrell.
By Unknown on 2021-07-26
The course was pretty basic stuff which most of the people know the course was like all relevant YouTube videos are sum up in one video
Quality Score
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Overall Score : 90 / 100












