How do I share a lead magnet?
Written by Cameron James·October 19, 2026Quick answer
To share a lead magnet, put it behind a short opt-in form on a landing page, then deliver it by email as a link rather than an attachment. Promote that landing page where your buyers already spend time, such as your site, social profiles, email signature and relevant communities. The file only matters once someone has asked for it, so spend your effort on the page and the delivery.
Key facts
- A lead magnet is shared in two steps: you share the landing page with the opt-in form, and the form then delivers the file.
- Hosted links can be changed after sending. A PDF attached to an email is a fixed copy, so a typo or outdated figure stays in every inbox it reached.
- Google Drive offers two general access settings for a link: Restricted, which limits access to people you have added, and Anyone with the link, which needs no sign-in. For a public lead magnet the second is the one that works, but anyone can then forward it.
- Viewers on a shared Drive file can view and, by default, download it unless the owner turns downloading off. A Drive link tells you nothing about who opened it or how far they read.
- In the UK, marketing emails to individual subscribers, including sole traders and some partnerships, normally need consent under PECR, with a limited soft opt-in exception for some commercial relationships. The consent rule does not apply to corporate subscribers. The ICO publishes the rules.
- Consent can be withdrawn, so every follow-up email needs a working way to unsubscribe.
Share the page, not the file
People often paste the PDF straight into a LinkedIn post or a DM and wonder why it generates nothing. If the file is freely handed over, you get no email address, no follow-up and no idea who saw it. Send people to a landing page with a one-line promise and a short form, and let the form hand over the file. If you are building out several of these, a lead magnet library helps you decide which asset belongs on which page. Getting people to the page in the first place is covered in how to promote your lead magnet.
Deliver by link, and say where it came from
The delivery email is the first thing a new lead reads from you, so keep it short and put the link near the top. The delivery email itself is worth getting right, because that is where a lot of people quietly drop off. When I was sending decks and one-pagers all day at DataBees, the attachments were the bit that always bit me: I could not fix a typo afterwards and I could not tell who had actually opened anything.
Know what happened after the click
A Drive or Dropbox link is fine for getting a file across, but it will not tell you whether the reader got past page one. If you want page-level engagement, or want to put a short recorded video walkthrough beside the PDF on one link, that is what LiveDocument is for. It does not run your opt-in form or your email list, so you still need a form tool for that, and it is not a watermarking or NDA tool. Lead magnet tracking covers what is worth measuring once the link is out.
The Bottom Line
Sharing a lead magnet is mostly sharing the promise on the landing page, then making delivery quick and measurable. Send a link, not an attachment, so you can fix it later and see what happened after the click.
Written by Cameron James