Stop Making These Instagram Profile Mistakes in 2025

In 2025, your Instagram profile is effectively your business card or website in a world where first impressions are everything. I do not want you to get this wrong. I'm about to audit the Instagram accounts of five coaches that have applied to work with us recently. And I'm going to run through step by step the changes that they need to make. I want you to take note and go and implement these changes on your own account asap so that you can increase your chances of making more sales. I'm Adam Haley and I've helped over a thousand personal trainers leave the gym floor, go fully online and hit consistent 5k months. Okay, so let's jump in and kick this thing off. So Instagram profile number one is Lauren Matthews. Let's start with the profile picture. So number one is I always like to see the purple ring around somebody's profile indicating that there are active and live stories up. The only caveat to this is if there is an intentional 24 hour story reset, which I'm guessing is not the case here. So looking at the actual profile photo itself, I think we can do better. I don't really like selfie images, it's a bit blurry and so on you. So I think you can't go wrong with just a nice high quality photo with you very clearly looking at the camera, looking friendly, approachable and just things like if you've been a guest at a wedding date night photo, a night out with your friends, a meal out, being on holiday, something like this that's outside of the gym tends to perform best. So that's number one there. Active stories and let's get that profile tweet. Secondly, we've got full name in the Instagram handle, which I think is great. The only thing that I would consider doing is getting rid of pt. I personally think it's more powerful when your Instagram handle is just your name. So in my case it's just at Adam Haley 1. I think that works best versus fitness coach PT. And the reason for this is that if somebody was to tag me on their Instagram stories, the average person be scrolling and they might go, oh, let me check this Adam Haley guy out. They click on it and then from there they can decide whether or not they follow. Whereas if I was to tag Lauren in this at Lauren Matthewspt very clear what she does. Somebody that isn't directly wanting coaching right now would probably be easy just to carry on on stories and skip it and not even go to the profile in the first place. So I personally like Instagram handles to be just about you. Personal, no fitness, no coach, no pt. Now, the two parts of an Instagram profile that are searchable is the handle. That's the worst arrow in the world, the handle. So the bit involved there and then underneath the profile picture, this bit in bold. So you always want your full name in at least one of these two places, which Lauren has done really well. The next thing that we can do is because we know that this is searchable, we can actually add some keywords here. So it might be online fitness coach, female fat loss coach, menopause, health coach, that sort of thing. So we can add some keywords in here. I think we should do next is if we are trying to build an online coaching business, which of course, Lauren, you've applied to work with us, so I would guess that's the case. I would get rid of anything that promotes you as a pt, use your current gym floor traffic, in person, referrals, word of mouth, current clients to help continue to build that side of it and use Instagram to be purely focused on online coaching. The second mistake I think you're making is you're going to work really hard to bring people to your account and then you are basically sending them over to somebody else's account here. So I would never have the Instagram handle of the gym that I work at or whatever because I'm basically sending free traffic to them and sending people away from my page. So I would get rid of that. Helping you start your fitness journey, not bad at all. Great if we can sharpen it a little bit and quantify it. So like, what is the fitness journey? Is it helping you to drop body fat? Is it helping you to increase your health and fitness? Helping you to shave minutes off of your run time? So we might want to tweak that. And then the final thing is I personally am not a fan of link trees. Whenever I see a link tree URL, I'm just thinking, first, this is going to be a bunch of links that are irrelevant to me. Secondly, they probably haven't been updated since 2020. Thirdly, they're probably going to be a load of discount codes for my protein and stuff like that. So I would send them just to like a clear pre application form so there's just one URL that they need to click. Don't confuse them, don't give them too many options, just send them to exactly where you want them to go. So overall, Lauren, not bad. Tweak the profile picture, turn up on stories more, maybe cut off The PT off of the handle. Get rid of sending people to the gym that you work at. Let's add a bold promise in here, which I'm going to come to in one of the next accounts and then just send people to a Pre application form versus a link tree. Instagram profile number two, Adam. So this dude here has over 200,000 followers, which is 10 times the amount of followers than I do. So this guy knows a thing or two about growing an account. So I'm not going to try and help him there, but instead I'm going to come across from a marketing point of view as to how we can actually get more leads and money out of this account. So let's start with the profile picture. Spot on. This is exactly what I referenced during the audit for Lauren, which is that we want something that's just like lifestyle, you know, personal, just looking friendly, approachable, high quality. Adam has nailed it here. And you can also see we've got the purple ring around his profile, indicating that he's got active stories up. So big tick in the box on that. If you look here as well, his Instagram handle is just his full name. There's no fitness, no coach, nothing like that, which is brilliant. One other thing actually is I've noticed that he's. Where is it he here? He's verified. I would advise any of you that are taking your business seriously for the sake of 10, 15 pounds per month to get the Instagram verification. And the reason is because if your account ever gets hacked, you've got a direct line to Meta to help recover it. So I would look at it almost as like business insurance. I know a lot of people need verification, the blue tick, to try and be an authority piece. I wouldn't look at it from that angle. I would just look at it as you've got direct live chat support with Meta and I think that's kind of invaluable. I think we are missing out on an opportunity here for some keyword search terms that we could use. And then here's where I really want to change things. So, number one, obviously, with online coaching, the huge upside is that it is location independent, meaning you can be in the UK and you can work with clients from the us, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Dubai, wherever, and vice versa. So I would get rid of the location here of Manchester. It's just not relevant. And then the second thing is, we've got here Irish pro wrestler, which is a really cool feat, but we can show that in your stories, we can weave it into your content. And so on. It's going to be quite obvious through that. So I don't think we need to take up like precious real estate on your. If I can put my pen back on your Instagram account on the bio, you know, we've got a limited amount of characters. People are inherently selfish. They want to land on your account and go, what's in it for me? Why should I hit follow? What am I going to get out of this and learn? So we can show that you live in Manchester by the restaurants that you tag, you know, on stories. We can show that you're a pro wrestler through stories or feed posts. I would make this all about the prospect. So I call it the bold promise. So who do you help? What do you help them achieve? And then what's the thing that you can help them achieve this result without having to do so? For example, for me it could be I help personal trainers leave the gym floor, hit 3 to 5,000 pounds per month without needing a huge Instagram following. So that's the kind of the format that I want you to use here. Now a couple of other bits is right here we have a cta. The problem is that it's not an outcome based cta. So people don't want coaching. People don't want to go through my mentorship, for example. What people want from me is to know how to land clients. So my call to action might be click here to land your first two to three online clients. For example, this could be want to drop your first dress size, want to drop your first 10 pounds, want to shave three minutes off your 10K, something like that. So let's make it more outcome based versus online coaching. Because people don't want online coaching, they want the result. Online coaching is just the vehicle. So that's part one. Secondly, we've got this email address in the way because we have the CTA which is obviously pushing people to here, which I'll come to in a second. But then we have this. And the cool thing with Instagram is where we've got these buttons, follow message and so on, we can actually have a specific email button. So again we don't have to take up characters within this short bio bit up here. And we can actually just have it as a separate tab. If your followers being able to email you is important. So that way at least the CTA can go straight to the bio line. And again, you can see here we've got a link tree. I would love us to get rid of that and just again go straight to A pre application form. So overall, this account is solid. Great profile picture, active on stories, verified personal Instagram handle. I would just add in a bold promise. So let's start making it about the follower, not us. Let's make the CTA to be outcome based and then let's just go to a pre application form and let's move the email address into a specific little button for email. And I think other than that, this account is solid. All right, Instagram profile number three, Henry Barlow. So let's start again with this. So firstly, we have no active stories up. Secondly, the profile photo is not the best quality. You're looking down, it's quite far, like you're quite zoomed out. And more importantly, obviously, it's a bodybuilding photo, which will appeal if you're working with really advanced clients that are doing either intense photo shoots, bodybuilding prep themselves, but if you're working with the general population, then I'd say this is just too intimidating and I think just a nice lifestyle image would actually work. Work best here, where you're looking at the camera, friendly, approachable, everything that I've already said. Then we have here Henry Barlow, Fit uk, if possible. I personally would get rid of this and then add the verification again. Let's add a section in here for searchable terms for whatever your audience might search for. And then here's really where I would start changing things. So we can move this to here, so we can have Henry Barlow and then online fitness coach, online fat loss coach, online men's health coach, whatever, so we can move that to there. The rest of it, though, are just sort of your qualifications, which, as I said in the previous audit, people are selfish. They don't care that you've got a bachelor's in nutrition, they don't care that you've got this association for nutrition, they don't care that you're a natural bodybuilder. They don't care about this. And again, we're sending them to the PCA Instagram account. So don't work hard to bring all these followers to your account and then go and send them elsewhere instead. We want to make the profile all about them with this bold promise. And then we want to have the cta, the one that's, you know, outcome based. And then we want to have a simple form here. These things like the PCA Muscle Model Natural Body Builder. They're going to see that through your Instagram stories, through your actions, how you live your life, your posts when you compete, your videos, your training reels. All of this so we can portray it there instead of taking up this kind of this unique space. That's our first opportunity to make a good impression. Humans are just wired to think, what's in it for me? So let's help them with that. Audit number four, Kelly Whiteman. So let's start profile picture. We got active stories. Great. But unless you are Nike, Apple or Gucci, I would not have your business logo as your profile picture because nobody cares. They want to see you. People buy into people online. And I've done this and tested this. Not only have I tested this across obviously the thousands of coaches that we have worked with where we've seen that lifestyle type images drastically outperform either business logos or gym related photos. But on top of that, when myself and my previous business partner set up our first online fitness coaching business, we had my account. So just Adam Haley one, we had his account, Akash Vegella and then we had the RNT Fitness account. This account had the business logo, the website. It was the more professional account that had all the branding and it actually had twice the amount of content. Whatever I posted from my account went on it. Whatever Akash posted from his account went on it. What's interesting is that over 12 months that account grew the slowest and it also bought in about 15% of the volume of clients that our personal accounts did. So hopefully that gives you the confidence to get this changed and have a nice clear photo of you. Next up. So there's something good and bad. So I mentioned earlier that this is searchable. This is searchable and you need your full name and at least one of the places so where Kelly doesn't have her name here, she does have it here, which is good. But I would still overall prefer to see your full name in your Instagram handle because unless I explicitly want to get in shape right now, if somebody tags your handle on Instagram stories and I'm not looking for a PT right now, I'm just not going to click it because it does what it says in the name, which is good, but it means if I'm not looking for a pt, I'm just going to keep scrolling. So I would really urge you to change that to a personal name. Okay, so let's look at the bio bit here. So let's start with this mum of two young boys. I know it's nice, but as mentioned, people are quite selfish. They want to know what's in it for them and they can see this through your Instagram stories and on your feed because presumably you'll show stories of you on the school run, little quirks that your boys do. If you take them on holiday, you're going to show all of that. So that will come across without us needing to take up the space in the bio. So I personally would remove that. And then we have long term lover of health and fitness with the emphasis on staying healthy, getting fit and having fun. Great. But can we tweak this so that we sort of use this bold promise format and make it about them versus your love for health and fitness? So it could be like, you know, I help other mums, for example, improve their health and fitness while still making it fun, for example. That's obviously just a first draft of it, but it's now more about them than you. And then we have level three personal trainer. So again you're rarely going to get asked for your qualifications. But more importantly, if you're trying to build this thing online, I would just get rid of anything to do with personal trainer. So I would have bold promise here. I'll then have the CTA and then I would go to the form that I mentioned. And lastly, because of course this is online coaching as referenced the location we can just remove because it's really not that important. So this account here, quite a bit that I would overhaul. Work through this step by step and I promise you this637followers will soon be a thousand followers. Final audit number five, Harry Lightfoot. So let's start with this. So great job on the active stories. I love that profile photo. Again, it's not the best quality and it's gym related, can be intimidating. The average general population person will probably scroll past this. I know that it could just be a coincidence, but if we think about it so far out of the accounts, the only account that does have just a nice lifestyle photo is Adams. And that is the account that has like 200k followers. So I'm not saying it's all because of the profile picture, but success does leave clues. So I would change this to make it a more approachable image from outside of the gym profile. Sorry, Instagram handle. Should I say I would get rid of. If I can edit it. Here we go. Get rid of this bit. Harry Lightfoot. Get the little verification here. I love what you've done with the body transformation expert. You're the first person to have used this space really well. So great job. And then we've got expert coaching built around your routine. We'll get you in shape and give a shit. And then we Got ready to change. Okay, so this bit here we could probably sharpen. So can we add in who you help get in shape? So is it guys, is it girls, is it both? Are they busy, are they stressed, are they parents, are they working in the corporate space? So we could potentially use that. And then it would be like, you know, I'm going to get you into the shape of your life whilst building it around your routine or without having to completely change your lifestyle or without having to spend hours in the gym or without having to give up your social life. So we can make this a bit more bit sharper based around them. And then here we've got ready to change and then coaching. So this isn't bad. Previously most accounts just say, like apply for coaching. You've actually got the outcome which is that they want to change. The question is, can we sharpen it a little bit? So I would have maybe like either quantifying it, want to drop that first three to five pounds, for example, or just a small tweak of ready to finally start seeing change. That can work really well as well. So overall that's a pretty good cta. And then I love this, you've gone to one form which I'm guessing is a pre application form, so there's one URL. We're not confusing our followers, sending them to all different links, we're sending them to exactly where we want them to go. So great job, Harry. So on this one, tweak the profile photo, potentially get rid of coaching, maybe add the verification so you've got that direct line to meta, tweak this bit in the middle to be more about them and then maybe sharpen the cta. But other than that it looks pretty solid. Now once you've set all of this up, you might be thinking, what do I do next? So don't worry, I've got you. In the description below, there's a video that I run step by step through the exact strategy that I implement on social media that's allowed all of our coaches to work with us, leave the gym floor, run their businesses fully online and hit 5, 10, 15k months.