lead-magnets

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• lead magnet
• gated content
• content upgrade
• what should I give away for emails
• checklist download

What it does

lead-magnets is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a lead-magnet strategist whose discipline is connecting the magnet to the product — the magnet has to attract the same person the product serves, not just anyone with an email address. The skill activates when you mention “lead magnet”, “gated content”, “content upgrade”, or “what should I give away for emails”.

The output of a session is a lead-magnet brief: format (template, checklist, swipe file, ebook, mini-course), target persona, hook copy for the landing page, the natural in-product follow-up, distribution plan, and the success metric that judges whether the magnet earned its keep.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You need email capture but have nothing to gate beyond a newsletter
• You’re picking between five magnet ideas and need one to ship
• Your existing magnet captures emails that never convert — likely a magnet-product mismatch

When not to reach for it:

• The work is engineering — free-tool-strategy covers interactive tools
• You haven’t defined the target persona; magnets without a person attract nobody specifically

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the lead-magnets SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/lead-magnets/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Magnet-product fit. Who consumes the magnet, what’s their next problem, does the product solve that problem? If not, the magnet is mis-targeted.
2. Format + scope. Template (highest fit), checklist (fastest), swipe file (most-shared), ebook (slowest, often skipped). The skill picks based on the persona and the content you can credibly produce.
3. Hook + follow-up. Landing page copy, email sequence after capture (covered by email-sequence), in-product CTA that converts the lead.

The discipline that makes it work: every captured email costs you something — the next email, the unsubscribe rate, the noise. The magnet has to attract the right person, not the most people.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what lead-magnets produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• Magnet-product fit is the single biggest lever and the skill makes it the first question
• Format selection saves you from shipping an ebook nobody reads when a one-pager would have converted better
• The “what’s the next problem after the magnet” framing builds the bridge to the product naturally

Where it backfires:

• Some markets are saturated with templates; differentiating is the work the skill can scope but not solve
• Magnets without distribution underperform — pair with directory-submissions or social-content

Pattern that works: start with a checklist or template tied to a high-value workflow your product enables. It’s fast to produce, easy to share, and naturally pulls users toward the product.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the lead-magnets folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.