Caleb O’Dowd is the Founder of Multichannel Marketing, a company dedicated to helping individuals launch and grow online businesses. A seasoned entrepreneur and marketing expert, he is known for his innovative direct-response marketing and customer acquisition strategies, with expertise spanning from direct mail to digital marketing. Caleb has trained over 100 copywriters, implementing proven systems for creating powerful sales messages. In his latest book, Monetization, he offers valuable insights to help marketers optimize sales funnels and increase back-end profits.
Robert Skrob is the President and Owner of Membership Services Inc., a leading consulting firm specializing in driving growth and retention for membership and subscription-based businesses. With over two decades of experience, he has helped hundreds of companies scale their membership programs. He pioneered monthly continuity subscriptions for for-profit programs in 2004, revolutionizing the sale of home study courses, seminars, online training, e-books, and coaching programs. Recognized as a guru in subscription models, he excels at converting short-term relationships into long-term memberships, significantly reducing churn. Robert is the author of five marketing books published by Entrepreneur Press and served as the President of the Information Marketing Association.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [7:03] How direct mail prepared Caleb O’Dowd for internet marketing success
- [09:47] The focus of the book Monetization and the number one mistake marketers make
- [14:07] Why focusing on a complete funnel is crucial, rather than just ads iteration
- [17:39] The power of the “ten 50s” exercise for deeper customer understanding and marketing impact
- [20:41] Why doing marketing research is critical in creating a strong sales message
- [24:40] The gap between average and greatness in copywriting
In this episode…
What makes some businesses soar while others barely scratch the surface of success? What are the systems and strategies that set them apart? How can you tap into that kind of explosive growth?
Marketing experts Caleb O’Dowd and Robert Skrob explore the common pitfalls of modern marketing, including an overemphasis on customer acquisition at the expense of monetization and back-end strategies. Caleb recounts his journey from learning under Gary Halbert to mastering newspaper and phone marketing and how he has adapted these principles for online platforms. Robert adds insights into how their collaboration has shaped a modern approach to multichannel marketing. Together, they discuss key concepts from Caleb’s book, Monetization, and highlight the critical importance of optimizing sales funnels and maximizing back-end profits—areas frequently overlooked in today’s marketing landscape.
In this episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, host Brian Kurtz is joined by Caleb O’Dowd, Founder of Multichannel Marketing, and Robert Skrob, President and Owner of Membership Services Inc., to discuss monetization and back-end strategies in modern marketing. They emphasize the importance of research and systems in crafting impactful marketing messages. With insights from the “ten 50s” exercise, they stress that the real power of copywriting comes from understanding the customer’s needs and mindset.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- Caleb O’Dowd on LinkedIn
- Robert Skrob on LinkedIn
- Monetization: How to Optimize Sales Funnels and Skyrocket Backend Profits by Caleb O’Dowd
Special mentions:
- 7 Steps to Freedom II: How to Escape the American Rat Race by Benjamin Suarez
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz and Martin Edelston
- Research Beast
Quotable moments:
- “Marketing had been so focused on acquisition that they had lost where the real money is, which is monetization.”
- “The secret isn’t the writing process that results in the sales; it’s all of the research phase that does.”
- “The hardest part of creating a brilliant sales message is knowing what to say and who to say it to and how to say it.”
- “The game is won in research, but no one has a system for that — until now.”
- “Understanding your customer is paramount, and the “ten 50s” system is a systematic way to achieve that understanding.”
Action Steps:
- Implement the “ten 50s” strategy to deepen your understanding of customer motivations and challenges. This method exposes hidden insights that fuel high-conversion sales messages.
- Focus on constructing a complete sales funnel instead of just the first sale to ensure long-term customer monetization and business sustainability.
- Regularly reassess your marketing channels’ performance and strategically integrate offline methods for holistic multi-channel monetization.
- Dedicate time to systematic research prior to writing copy to ensure the final product resonates deeply with the target audience’s needs and desires.
- Learn from marketing masters of the past and apply their timeless principles to modern platforms for a competitive edge in today’s crowded digital landscape.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here, host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two-hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business. The bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either. Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [slash] help. And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerators are fit for you with no obligation. Go to Briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [slash] help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode or just to say hi at brian@briankurtz.net. Now, onto today’s episode. This is a good segue into Caleb O’Dowd and Robert Skrob. And Robert made sure to tell me that Caleb gets top billing, so I just did that. But Robert is one of my heroes, so he’s going to get billing whether he likes it or not. So Caleb, I mentioned in the preview for this he was a student of Gary Halbert. That’s not his claim to fame, but it certainly puts him on my map more than most copywriters and most people talking about what his new book talks about. He’s also became an expert in newspaper space, in addition to direct mail. But he did newspaper space. He did phone telemarketing. So Caleb is a samurai multi-channel marketer with his roots in direct mail, because he was mentored by Gary Halbert, and now having been mentored by Robert Skrob, who in his new book, in Caleb’s new book Monetization, I’m going to read the acknowledgement, it’s short and sweet. Acknowledgement: I’d like to give a special thanks to the greatest consultant in direct marketing, Robert Skrob. Thanks for believing in what I have to offer and your steadfast commitment to getting Monetization published. Everybody who benefits from this book has you to thank for it. All right, Robert, I’m done with you now. But I needed to just, you know, you are a titan of the highest order in my book. And I just wanted everybody to make sure that we’re dealing with royalty here. And Caleb is royalty too, as is Justin.
Robert Skrob 4:13
But I’m just glad you read the book so far.
Brian Kurtz 4:15
Yeah, I only read the acknowledgement in a couple of chapters. I was busy the last three months, so –
Robert Skrob 4:22
Of course. Well, congratulations, father of the bride.
Brian Kurtz 4:25
Thank you, thank you. So Caleb, you’re on, aren’t you? Where are you?
Caleb O’Dowd 4:30
I hope you guys can hear me.
Brian Kurtz 4:33
Yeah, and you can see you too. Wow. You’re so clean cut, man.
Caleb O’Dowd 4:36
I’m a little Balder than the last time we spoke, I think.
Brian Kurtz 4:39
Yeah, you are, but I’m sure you’re still just as smart.
Caleb O’Dowd 4:44
Well, yeah, I hope so, yeah, yeah. How you doing, Brian?
Brian Kurtz 4:47
I’m good. Caleb. Really good to see you. Caleb and Robert were both members of Titans Mastermind and both great friends, colleagues. I’m so pleased that Robert suggested that you come to speak, to speak to this group. This is a group of just, you know, incredible entrepreneurs, copywriters, marketers, they’re going to love what you guys are going to talk about today. I’ll kick it off with, leading in from Justin, because you just finished, you know, giving us more than a primer on direct mail, you gave us a master class course on it. But I want to talk about your roots. Caleb, not so much. I already shared with this group on one of our monthly USBs that we send out, the interview I did with you at Titans Mastermind, when you talked about what was it like to work with had Gary Halbert. So, you know, they can watch that and hear about, you know, him coming to the door in his underwear and telling you to go to the supermarket and get his clothes dry clean, in exchange for you paying him a ton of money to teach him to teach you copywriting. So those stories were great, but that’s not we’re going to talk about today. But you know, with your background in direct mail, and then you became the guy in newspaper, you were like the guy teaching newspaper space advertising for a while, and phone telemarketing, talk about how that prepared you for your new book. And I want to just plug the book. It’s called Monetization: How to Optimize Sales Funnels and Skyrocket Backend Profits. Does not sound like a guy who learned direct mail from Gary Halbert. So talk about the transition from that to this, and how you got there and if Robert wants to chime in at any time he can, and he’ll probably have his own questions as well. But let’s start there. Caleb, how did you get here from there?
Caleb O’Dowd 6:50
Yeah, all right. Well, hello everybody. And you know, thanks for the opportunity to talk with you all here today.
Brian Kurtz 6:58
Caleb is from Brooklyn, by the way, based on his accent, you would have known that.
Caleb O’Dowd 7:03
Yeah, well, I’m from Ireland, yeah. So, you know, at 19, I started learning marketing. I got the opportunity to move from my hometown in Ireland all the way to Miami Beach to learn from Gary Halbert. You know, he quickly got me into direct mail. We went from, you know, zero, we had to to, like, a million dollar business in our first year, we went on to be one of the largest mailers in the health supplement industry for many years running there. How did I go from the mail to the internet? It was just a transition, I guess. I learned direct response, core fundamental principles of direct response from Gary. You know, he was big into newspaper advertising. He was big into direct mail. Those were kind of his two primary channels. So it was inevitable that I was going to get into those myself. But what I quickly learned was that the concepts, the principles, the thinking that Halbert had shared with me, you know, it was applicable to almost anything that I was doing, you know. So we went on to crush it in direct mail. We went on to crush it in the newspapers. We did loads and loads of magazines, a little bit of radio, and then we moved on to the internet. And the internet is where I feel like I had such an enormous competitive advantage online, because I just, like you guys are talking about, you know, I was kind of, I came from the I was, like The Last of the Mohicans that made it over, you know, from Old World direct marketing at a high level, and kind of came online at a time, I think, where that kind of knowledge was was dying out to a great extent. And to me, what I found was, to me, it was basic, dull, kind of everyday stuff. But as I started to apply it on the internet, I started to have really explosive results that were kind of above and beyond what I saw perhaps my competitors getting. And you know, we went on to do a lot on the internet, we went on to do webinars at a very high level, VSL funnels at a very high level, did product launches, we did a lot of Facebook and YouTube advertising at a very high level, and all of the same kind of core fundamental principles and concepts, and pretty much, you know, everything that I had learned from Halbert. All of this stuff just keeps getting translated into different channels, different mediums, different executions of marketing, and all the various different ways that we do it. And where did the book come from? The book kind of came from, you know, I eventually started working with clients, and what I found was that so many marketers really just focused on creating the front end offer. You know, they just kind of focused on whatever it may be, the webinar, the VSL, the sales letter of some kind. And they all ended up coming to me trying to figure out everything else. And what I quickly realized was that marketing had been so focused, modern internet marketing is so focused on getting the front end sale, they’ve so focused on acquisition that they had lost what, you know, where the real money is, which is monetization. And everybody was coming to me looking to get their funnels fixed. They were like, they had AOV problems. They had great conversion rates, but they weren’t able to scale. There were no profits in the business. They had no kind of upsell funnel that was intelligent. We put together, no idea of what back end monetization was, how to really monetize, you know, their customers and prospects and the book kind of came from that. What I started to realize was, gosh, I really feel like I have this, this kind of legacy of Old World information that modern marketers don’t really have, and the whole multi channel marketing thing is really just based on a lot of my experience, you know, like Rob and I are always talking about this. And you know, one of the kinds of things that I see in modern marketing is there’s so many marketers when you ask them, What is multi-channel marketing? They talk about, oh, yeah, that’s when you acquire customers from Google and Facebook. They think of it in terms of like multi-channel marketing is about having multiple traffic sources, when to me, multi channel marketing is really not about multiple traffic sources at all. It’s about monetizing people across multiple channels, both online and offline. And you know, that’s kind of where the book came from. The book came from me needing to educate my own clients, and you know, on what it is that they need to do once that initial sale is kind of made, and from that point forward, you know.