How coaches make money from Instagram DMs comes down to four golden appointment setting strategies: follower outreach, a content to CTA converter, long-term follow-ups, and DM ads. I've refined these over two to three years working with the best coaches in the industry, including but not limited to Alvin, Ashton Hall, Wolf of Bay, FBA Jaden, and Frank Gogo. So many coaches build amazing brands yet never capitalize on the engagement and followers they already have. In the video above, I walk through all four, so you can add an extra five or even six figures to your business by leveraging what you already have.
Here are the four golden strategies, in the order I would build them:
- Follower outreach: message followers who already know your brand.
- The content to CTA converter (the triple C): turn comments on your content into DM conversations.
- Long-term follow-ups: re-engage leads you spoke with one to two months ago.
- DM ads: pay to put your best CTA content in front of more qualified viewers.
Strategy one: follower outreach
Follower outreach is reaching out to your followers who are already familiar with your brand. As simple as that. It is the fastest money because those people already chose to follow you, so I break the full follower outreach system into four steps below.
Step one: hire a virtual assistant
You want to make sure they have these four character traits:
- The first one is charisma.
- The second one is conciseness.
- The third is consistency.
- The fourth is conviction.
I won't go in full depth here because I've recorded a full walkthrough on hiring an A-level appointment setter, where I accumulated everything I've seen from six to seven figure businesses on how they hire the best setters out there.
Step two: scrape your followers
The app I personally use is the Chrome IMan extension on Google Chrome, because it has the best features and pricing. You can select what account to scrape and pull the followers, the following, the hashtags, the location, and detailed information about the profiles. You can also set a limit and a delay. For example, every 12 seconds it scrapes one profile, so the higher you set it, the safer it becomes. As a remark, make sure to use an alternative account while you're scraping.
Once you've scraped these followers, import and organize them onto a Google Sheet with the username, full name, and profile link. You can also use additional AI tools to filter out leads who don't qualify based on their name or country.
Step three: reach out to your followers
The highest converting method we found is pre-recording a voice message, then dragging and dropping it to your leads. That way you appear more authentic, it feels more personalized, and they're more likely to respond to a voice message than to text, because they assume you took the time to record it for them.
What can you send? Something like: "Hey, just wanted to reach out and say thank you for following and supporting my page, it really goes a long way. Are you currently on a fitness journey or are you just enjoying the content?" That single question filters the leads who are only there for the content from the ones who are serious about changing their fitness trajectory.
As a bonus, you can lift your conversion rate further by customizing the first sentence based on the lead's first name. Instead of just saying "hey," you say "hey John." You can do that with a few lines of code and AI voice tools like ElevenLabs. It's simple, and it moves the number a lot.
How many outreaches a day? You can reach out to 50 up to 250 followers daily. Test what works for your account without getting restricted, because each account has its own DNA. Find the DNA of your own account.
Step four: book them on a call or sell them in your DMs
Use a framework. A winning one we found with fitness coaches is, after the outreach question filters out the content-only leads, you ask the serious ones for:
- Their goals. "What kind of health and fitness goals are you working towards? Happy to give advice or send some resources your way."
- Their past and current situation. "What are you currently doing, or what have you tried to make that happen?"
- Their struggle. "What would you say are the biggest things you struggle with, or what's stopping you from achieving that goal?"
- Their priority level. "Would you say it's a priority for you to get help?"
- And finally the CTA.
Sell in the DMs if you're offering a low ticket product, and propose a call if you're offering a high ticket one, because a call is the best way to close high ticket deals. It's very difficult to close them in the DMs. Adapt the framework to your specific offer.
Now, how do you automate qualifying these leads and getting them to buy? You can delegate it to a VA to message and qualify manually, do it with AI, or do it with both. We use both because AI handles 80% of the repetitive work while the VA covers the 20% AI cannot, and we found this to be the best setup possible. More on that in our breakdown of AI DM automation for coaches.
Alvin's results
As proof this works, take Alvin, whose process is entirely automated. His VA does all of the follower outreach and follow-ups, and when followers respond, AI takes over and qualifies them all the way to the end. He averages around 10 to 12 free trial CTAs sent a day purely through follower outreach, with no inbound leads. He gets around three to four free trial signups, and out of those, two to three turn into paid clients at $100 a month. That's roughly $200 to $300 a day on autopilot, all run by the VA and AI. More importantly, he then upsells those clients into his high ticket program, so he doesn't stop there. Alvin generates almost half of his revenue just by reaching out to his followers.
Strategy two: the content to CTA converter (the triple C)
You've probably seen a lot of influencers use this, including Ashton Hall. He ends his caption with "comment the word strategy," and the comments fill up with leads typing the keyword.
Here's how the mechanism actually works. Most coaches miss the most important part of converting a commenter into a paying client, which is to continue the conversation after you send the freebie. A lot of them skip it because they don't have anyone to help, and it takes serious time to converse with those leads and get them on a call.
Follow a framework and adapt it to your business, then delegate it to AI plus a VA. This is what we always do. We never let the coach do it themselves. It will eat four, five, even eight hours a day once the leads pile up, so it has to go to AI and an A-level VA. There's a deeper playbook on the comment-to-DM funnel in how to close a client a day with CTA reels.
Ashton Hall and Jaden's results
The first success story here is Ashton Hall, who generates between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a month using this tactic alone. He puts "comment ASAP" on the reel, and when leads comment, his setters jump in and qualify them for his $10,000 high ticket program. Then there's Jaden Adamson, who makes thousands of dollars a day using the triple C mechanism alongside follower outreach. He puts "comment ready below," and when the leads comment, Jaden reaches out, starts qualifying, and gets them on a call.
The reputation paradox
I want to address the reputation paradox. Most coaches believe their audience will think they're spamming them and resent it. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Not only are you handing your engaged followers a free resource, which raises their tendency to reciprocate, you're also giving them personalized attention in the DMs. You can't believe how much those leads value your personal touch. By having a genuine conversation, you guide them toward the solution that fixes their problem using a proven framework, and they don't even feel sold. It's smooth, helpful selling.
Strategy three: long-term follow-ups
Long-term follow-ups means reaching out to leads you spoke with one to two months ago. Often you talk to leads who aren't ready yet. Reach out a few weeks or months later and they may be in a spot where they desperately need your help.
Why does no one do it, and why should you? While every other coach chases new, cold leads who know nothing about them, you can do the opposite and prioritize warm leads. It's the easiest way to close deals with people who already know you and your value. The whole sequence can run on autopilot, which I cover in Instagram DM follow-up automation.
Strategy four: DM ads
DM ads work the same way as organic content with CTAs, with two differences: you pay to reach more quality viewers, and you choose exactly who sees the content.
When should you run them? If you already have a great offer the market needs, ads are a great way to add fuel to the fire. But if there's no fire in the first place, no engagement and no proven offer people actually need, your money will likely go to waste.
A success story is Jud, aka Wolf of Bay, who generates hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. A huge part of that is consistently running all four strategies: follower outreach, the content to CTA converter (mostly inside his DM ads), long-term follow-ups with leads that went cold a month or two ago, and the DM ads themselves. He runs a lot of ads. He's featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2024, and he's an e-commerce coach.
How do you put the four strategies on autopilot?
The four golden strategies are what almost every six to seven figure online coach uses to generate consistent, growing cash flow without managing any part of the process. They spend their time building their brand and serving their community instead of grinding through the DMs, which matters a lot, yet is very boring work.
The simple roadmap to get there:
- Hire a talented VA or appointment setter. They need to be disciplined, consistent, and fluent in English. Give it one to two weeks of pure focus, because if you rush it you'll hire someone who churns within days, weeks, or months. You want someone good who shows real long-term commitment.
- Set up an AI co-setter to automate 80% of the process. You need this once you have at least 40 leads a day, inbound or outbound. Skipping it leads to poorer setter performance and late responses, which cause a roughly 397% drop in conversion rate (that's a real study you can look up), plus the inability to scale past human limits, poor data management, and setter burnout. See the kind of results this AI plus VA system produces, and the full $200k/mo AI DM system we run end to end.
- Spend one hour a week on maintenance. That's all you need to run all four strategies consistently and keep iterating on them.
Implement those three steps thoroughly and you'll add tens of thousands of dollars to your monthly revenue while leveling up your brand and generating more leads, without getting buried in the process yourself.
More importantly, I'll show you how to remove yourself from appointment setting entirely by providing the full AI appointment setting infrastructure to hit the results above. That's the whole goal: you stay independent, focused on building your brand, while everything runs automatically in the back end.