STEAL IT: Dan Ekis' Instagram Course

"How to build an audience even if your art sucks" contains great tips for beginners. If you're a little further along, here's where the value is.

This is a review of Dan Ekis’ How to Build an Audience (Even If Your Art Sucks) course which is available on his Gumroad page. It’s listed at $97, and yes, dear reader, you have to pay for it if you want it. “STEAL IT” is a joke, I don’t literally mean that.

Your first 50-100 followers are usually your friends and family.

After that, you might experiment with a few hashtags, or try different kinds of content to see what sticks.

But you usually stall out somewhere around a few hundred followers, and you stay there for a good while.

This is definitely where I was, and as I was wrapping up work on the first arc of my webcomic Ronin Digital Express, I started to think that I wanted more than just my family and friends to see it (no offense, love you all, please share all the things).

Now, I tend to be skeptical of “courses”. I’ve bought a few here and there, I’ve attended free webinars, yadda yadda, and the formula I’ve observed is typically as follows:

• Title promises big wins, i.e., “Make $100,000 in your first month”

• Host and/or guests appear to be qualified

• Content mostly features them spitballing for an hour

• Content ends with them trying to sell you something

• You feel sad and incomplete

So why did I buy into Dan’s course?

Three big reasons: One, he is definitely qualified for the subject, what with his tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and YouTube. Two, his enthusiasm and acumen for the business and marketing side of the art world are readily apparent. Three, he was promoting the course and offering it for something like half-off, and what can I say, I’m a sucker for a deal.

The course collected dust for a month or so as I wrapped up final tweaks on my webcomic/dodged coronavirus particles at holiday gatherings. Last month, I finally gave it a push and wrapped it up a few weeks back.

If you’re skeptical of courses like I am, my goal here is to write a no-nonsense review that will help you make a purchase decision. Dan hasn’t commissioned this review, and I do have some quibbles and critiques of the course.

So what follows is hopefully a useful guide to the course, should you choose to purchase it. I’ll keep it brief, but include details on what worked/what didn’t for me, as well as my overall impression/recommendation.

Course overview

How to Build an Audience (Even If Your Art Sucks) is comprised of 10 videos in the core course, each ranging in length but usually lasting no longer than an hour.

The course presentation features Dan speaking over a slideshow. Each slide typically contains some kind of “main idea” or nugget of encouragement, alongside a piece of either Dan’s art, or that of another popular artist Dan is a fan of.

The content itself is a melange of advice about developing your skills as an artist, tactics for maximizing impact on Instagram, and personal motivation/encouragement.

I imagine the ideal student for the course is one who is learning about marketing and social media for the first time, but there’s also a lot here about basic artistic skills like composition. It seems to be designed to guide a novice artist both in developing a voice and a style, and growing an online audience simultaneously.

The course also comes with a generous amount of bonus content in the form of webinars or podcasts which feature Dan interviewing an artist with a big online following, like Maxine Vee or Nadia Rausa.

These bonus chapters include insights from the guest artists on things like marketing, growing an audience, and turning YouTube into a revenue stream.

What works/what doesn’t

As someone who is a little further along than the ideal student in terms of developing a style and a voice, I was mainly attracted to the course for the social media tactics.

The observations and insights therein are extremely helpful. I took dozens of pages of notes, and I’ve implemented many of the tactics suggested. In just the previous week, I’ve seen my Instagram account attract 100 new followers, which, for someone who was stuck at ~200 for a year or more, is pretty significant.

Dan definitely provides valuable answers to the “what exactly do I need to do” questions. Too many articles and webinars on social media growth hacking fall short of prescribing actual implementable tactics, and opt for generic advice (e.g., “post at peak times!” “post content your audience loves!” No shit, you don’t say).

However, these tactics and social media insights are largely concentrated in the last couple videos of the main course. One of the earlier videos has some good insights into how the Instagram algorithm actually works, but out of the 10 videos, what I was looking for was mostly localized to about 3 of them.

The middle section is much more philosophical. Those videos cover things like developing an artistic mindset, community building, adding value to your audience, and creating art people actually like.

It’s all good stuff, and largely tracks with what I’ve managed to pick up elsewhere and via my own experience. So for a completely green artist, getting these lessons all in one place can definitely be valuable.

Though my own attention waned some in the middle, I recognize that for the right student, this course is a holistic document that covers every angle of building an audience online.

Some of the bonus materials were interesting, but sometimes redundant to the main material. With titles like “How to Get 80,000 Followers on Social Media,” they do fall a bit into that formula I identified above, where the title makes big promises, but the content leaves you a bit high and dry. I filled a dozen pages with notes from the core course, and mostly just put the bonus content on in the background while drawing, perking up for the occasional insight.

The bonus content doesn’t appear to have been recorded for the course, but rather, had already been published on Dan’s YouTube channel and is just thrown in here as a take-it-or-leave-it bonus.

It doesn’t really affect the value of the course for me. I’d have paid the same amount for just the core course without the bonus content. But, the titles of the bonus materials did have me thinking they might go hyper-niche and hyper-tactical and I’d get some more meat and potatoes from it than I did.

Overall impression

The core course is mainly what you’re after here, and I think it was well-worth the price of admission. Dan covers actionable tactics for audience growth that actually work, and you’re just not going to find that sort of thing succinctly laid out and targeted to an artist audience in a free webinar somewhere.

If you’re a little further along in your artistic journey, you can feel free to skip around some. If you’re here specifically for the social media hacks, they’re mostly concentrated in a couple of videos. The philosophical stuff ties it all together and provides a good foundation, but you might find it redundant if you have a bit more experience.

The bonus materials, for me, were mostly “nice to have.” It might be interesting to hear how other successful artists built their audiences, but they have more of the “free webinar” structure, and are light on actionable tactics.

Despite some of the “bloat” on the course, I would still fully recommend picking it up. Like I said, it just simply contains the kind of actionable advice you’re not going to get so easily anywhere else. Even if you have to hunting for it a bit.

If you want to check out the course for yourself, it’s available at Dan’s Gumroad page.