The Micro Influencer Method

I'm going to show you the fastest way to land online fitness clients. In 2025, it took my clients Charlie and Freya from hitting 5k months to 32k months within 8 months. It took Alex from having no Instagram account and zero online fitness clients to hitting 7K per month within seven months. Yes. That means that she grew at a rate of 1,000 pounds per month, every single month. Basically, it works. And it's called the Micro Influencer method. I'm Adam Haley and I've helped over a thousand personal trainers get off the gym floor, get fully online and hit in excess of £5,000 per month. I first had the light bulb moment for this method back in 2018. So I'd done 11 years on the gym floor. Then I built an online fitness coaching business to a team of six. I exited that and then I'd launched a mentorship program to help personal trainers become better personal trainers. But I had more and more of them asking me, how do I grow my business, how do I land clients, and so on. So at this point, it was a fully fledged mentorship. Then one day I get a message from a guy called nigel. He had 126,000 followers on Instagram, was a really busy PT, but had like three online clients and he was messaging me asking for my help. So it turns out that we were both in London for the day, so we decided to meet in a coffee shop and I basically, for free, gave him like an hour, hour and a half consult. I took his phone off of his hands, put up a few Instagram stories for him, and straight away he had leads coming in for the first time. He was mind blown. At the end of it, he was saying like, dude, you know, thanks so much for this. What can I do to pay you back? So I asked the waitress if she could take a photo of the two of us doing some fake, you know, posing, looking at his laptop and me pointing at something, looking, you know, smart or whatever. So we took that photo, I wrote a caption and gave it to him and said, dude, as a thanks, if you can just post this on your feed, I know that you're going to have lots of other personal trainers following you. And if you can just hype up, you know, what I've done, that's more than enough for me. What ended up happening is over the next, like two to three days, I just, every hour had new followers coming onto my account and they were all my ideal market. They were all personal trainers, they were people that were Following Nigel, were PTs and fitness coaches and online coaches themselves had seen this post and gone, whoa. You know, Nigel has 126,000 followers. If this guy's helped him, I'm sure he can help me. And I made so many sales in that next sort of seven to ten day period. So that was light bulb moment number one, really. So I sat down with somebody, I helped them out for free. I got them a result. They tagged me on their feed and on their stories, and I made money from it. I signed up people because they trusted Nigel's judgment. The second kind of series of light bulb moments were that I'm a bit of a productivity geek. So when I would share, like, certain productivity drinks, big day, new tonic, nicotine gum, these sorts of things to my Instagram stories, I would then notice other coaches, like the days afterwards taking delivery of Nutonic, chewing on nicotine gum, and often they would end up tagging me. I even noticed it with my favorite drink. So my favorite cocktail is the Old Fashioned. And the amount of times that I would have people go and have an Old Fashioned for the first time and then tag me in it. Go in like, dude, I don't know how you drink this thing. It was kind of crazy. The epiphany that I had is that very clearly I am not an influencer, but I have some level of influence. So then I started thinking, what if I can find more people that have a level of trust and influence over their audience, and if I could partner with them, do a great job for them, and then have them ethically tag me, surely that would lead to more eyes, more followers, and more people coming to my page that trust me from day one. So the question that you want to ask yourself is, why am I fighting to try and persuade people to trust me to buy my product or work with my coaching service, when actually I could just bypass that process? I could partner with somebody instantly have access to the audience that they have built and leverage the trust that they have with that audience. And this is basically the micro influencer method. This is typically how most coaches will go about trying to land clients, is it will be the coach engaging with the prospect, and in between them is this hesitation, is this lack of trust that they're having to overcome. This is the typical sort of like coach prospect relationship. But instead, when we bypass this and instead we have an influencer tag us and promoters straight away, we have access to more people at once. And more importantly, we have this green line. We have trust. Instead of there being hesitations, it's like, oh, well, this person that I followed for X amount of time and look up to, if they trust them, then they must be good. What's even better is we can go super ninja with this. And if we actually end up building what I call like a pod of influencers, imagine the market that you start to attract. Imagine the new eyes that you bring to your page that inherently trust you from day one and want what you're offering. Pretty freaking cool. Hey. So the question that you probably have at this point is how do I do this? How do I get going with this method? Please ignore the useless sketch on here, but this is effectively what we want to work towards. So too many people try and this is with client acquisition, this is, we're trying to bring influencers on board. They try and go straight for people they've never ever, ever had any interaction with. People that have got like, you know, a million followers. And I would call these basically, you know, colds. This is like the blue circle on the outer rim. Instead. It's much easier if we start with own network of people. So for example, it's much easier if we start in the middle with people that are hot and know us and we start with our own pool of people that we know. For example, let's say you're a female coach watching this. Let's say that you get your makeup done or your nails or your hair or your eyelashes or whatever and you have a nail girl, you know, eyelash technician, whatever they're called, and they have an Instagram page that has a decent amount of followers and people that trust this person. Imagine what would happen if you went on a fat loss journey with them as their coach for free. The makeup artist, you got them a phenomenal result and then they were to just ethically talk about their journey on their stories. You know, when they have their check ins with you, when they go to the gym, if they were to just tag you in the corner, if they were to do some progress photo updates or they, they go out, they have an amazing photo taken of them feeling really confident and in the caption they reference you. Imagine what that would do to your business. So step one is thinking, who do I know within my own sort of social circle or people that I deal with any way that have an audience that sort of interlinks with mine that perhaps I could approach, deliver an amazing job for free and have them tag me and shout from the rooftops about me. Phase two is then going one degree out of that and now we're going into the warm stage. This would be friends of friends. This would be perhaps somebody that's somewhat local to you, has a decent size audience, but you don't quite know them yet, but you might know somebody that can put you in touch. If this is the case, see if you can have an intro made. And then the third and final step would be what I would call cold. And then this would be you actively approaching influencers that you follow their pages, you come across them, you don't know them, they don't know you, you don't have anybody in the middle and you're going to slide into their DMs and make them a bit of an offer with steps one and two, this is on you to of course do a bit of a deep dive socially into your own network and see what you can come up with. In terms of step three, here's how I like to break it down. I would start to think of like verticals, I call them. So think of different industries and think of it through the lens of what would my typical client actually spend time engaging with or following with or who would they look up to? For example, if you coach guys, then the beauty and cosmetics one probably isn't going to be a good shout. So let me run through a couple of examples. So on the left side we have what I put luxury travel. So this is, let's say that you tend to attract, or you want to attract relatively affluent, you know, wealthy type people. Perhaps you could look at the sort of places that they tend to go. So could be boutique hotels, could be certain airlines or private jet companies, could be chauffeurs, could be travel bloggers, any of these sorts of people that fall within the luxury travel market. You could find their pages, beauty and cosmetics. So you could find makeup artists, nail girls, hair salons, all of these sorts of accounts. And then fashion, of course, would be fashion bloggers. So once you start finding these accounts, all you want to do is go and engage on some of their content for a few days, like their stories, leave some real legitimate comments and then send them a message. Don't overthink it. You know, I'll give you a loose script here, but you should come up with your own thing. And it could be like, hey, love the page you built. Been following your content over the last two weeks. This thing here really made me laugh. And then reference it. By the way, I'm an online fitness coach. I'm really great at X, Y, Z, but evidently I suck at social media. I really envy the audience that you've built. The trust that you've built with it. Just wondering if you have a holiday coming up or a photo shoot or anything. Would you like me to help get you in shape for it? And in return, you know, you can tag me on Instagram stories if I do a great job. Like something like that. When they come back and say, yeah, that sounds great, you get them on a call, you run them through your coaching process, you sign them up and you make an agreement that it's like, hey, I'm going to deliver X, Y, Z. And in return, you're just going to show your journey to your audience. You'll want to set yourself a target of maybe like five opens per day. So from now, for the next 30 days, five opens per day for influencers. That could be a good fit for you. And then finally, you want to take these considerations into account. Number one, what's the onboarding and ramp up phase that I want them to go through? So when they come on board and they get their plans for that first seven days on their account, when their own motivation is going to be at its highest, how can we sort of capitalize on that and talk through this new journey they're about to embark on to their followers? Secondly would be what I call maintaining performance. So it's very easy when somebody first starts working with you, when, as I mentioned, motivation and enthusiasm is high. But how do you maintain that for the long term and ensure that two months, three months, four months down the line, they're still tagging you with enthusiasm? The third thing would be tracking their efficiency. So how do you know if they're performing? How do you know if you're bringing in the right sort of followers from their account? Are you getting into conversations? Are you getting calls booked? And ultimately, have you managed to sign up clients you can attribute back to them? And then longer term, once you've found a couple of accounts that do really, really well for you, you can actually set them up on perhaps a monthly retainer and they'll post on behalf of you almost as like a collab. Or you can even do some form of commissions where each client that signs up directly off the back of them earns them X percentage. So don't sleep on this. This is by far the easiest method to land online fitness clients. This year. My clients are using this method are crushing it. And if you want a hand implementing it, then just check out the link in the description below.