You know the marketing tides are turning when a pair of Digital Generation entrepreneurs create a CD course on generating direct mail leads. But that’s just what Ryan Deiss and Luke Jaten have done with the release of “Offline Arbitrage,” a training suite that promises to teach upstarts how to get started in direct mail.

Until recently, 30-year-old Deiss was typical of many marketers his age, outright dismissing direct mail. His dim view of direct brightened after he met partner Jaten, another young entrepreneur who was enjoying tremendous success in offline/direct marketing.

“There’s this whole generation of marketers coming out who have only ever done online,” Deiss said. “But what’s happened over the last few years is that online marketing has gotten a lot more expensive. People think e-mail is free, but it actually costs a lot to manage your e-mail lists, have deliverability specialists, and stuff like that.”

Though Offline Arbitrage is promoted toward the work-at-home crowd, Deiss says the course’s strategies can be leveraged by small businesses as well. Offline Arbitrage offers several courses that focus on different sets of marketing strategies, including how to rent mail lists as a basis for starting your own sellable lists.

“That can help cover the basic marketing costs to acquire your leads,” Deiss told Deliver. “The course is for direct response marketers like me who have largely ignored the offline world,” Deiss said. “My e-mails have to compete against hundreds of spam messages, but when I drop a similar promotion straight into somebody’s hand, the response rates are through the roof.”