Knowledge is the greatest gift that life has to offer. Life would not be the same without the knowledge that we have today.
The way we give and gain knowledge remained mostly unchanged for most of history. It usually involves a teacher and student relation or a master and apprentice relation. The one who receives the instruction is the most likely to be the teacher.
There are also those who learn on their own. Self-study has become possible thanks to advances in writing and reading. WIth detailed instructional books, it became possible for people from all walks of life to gain knowledge without a teacher or a master.
Then came the online revolution. While the popular opinion is that the advent of the internet revolutionized learning and education in general, it did not really change much except the way how people receive and consume information.
My opinion is that the internet did the best job of democratizing knowledge on a scale not seen since instructional films were created and the invention of the printing presses.
The internet allowed teachers and teachers at heart to impart their knowledge to people that they never imagined they would meet. It allowed education and knowledge to break boundaries and borders, even without a plane ticket and a visa.
While most of it started on unlikely websites such as youtube and vimeo, or maybe even written blogs. We now have dedicated websites that allow people to teach courses.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Legit Marketing Reviews’ YouTube channel. To get a comprehensive overview of Podia, you may still want to check out our article below.
Podia a Brief Overview Ferm Living Podia
Podia is an online platform that allows people to share their knowledge of different things while also making money. Podia customers create online courses that can be tailored to their students. These courses can be put on the platform by customers and sold to them.
Podia gives you the tools and hosts your online courses.
Podia’s market does not only cover online courses. Podia is one of the most popular digital content selling platforms. These content could include the mentioned online courses. This content could include coaching, webinars and community as well as digital products.
The company behind Podia has New York City as its headquarters. Additional offices are located in Austin, Texas. It is fairly new but somehow old by internet standards. It was launched in 2014 by Spencer Fry, a man who is behind it.
Fry created a platform that would make it easier for online creators to market their products and to connect with their audience. Fry wanted it to be easier, but also provide a friendly and welcoming environment for people.
Podia, a website that is intuitive, powerful, and user-friendly, was created from scratch.
Why use Podia?
Podia is a standout among the many online platforms, mainly because of its creator-friendly policies. Podia has a digital shopfront that allows for instant payment from sales and does not charge any transaction fees. Yep, that’s right, podia takes no money for any transaction you make.
Podia’s platform is designed to be creator-friendly. Creatives can execute their visions and ideas with an intuitive platform that is comprehensive and easy to use, even if they don’t have the technical knowledge.
Podia makes it simple to get digital content on the market.
Podia can be transferred to even if you already have a digital content. Other digital platforms can offer too many features that could be considered as an overkill. Although too many options might seem appealing at first glance, it can lead to overwhelming experiences.
Your business may be in decline because of this lack of focus. Podia’s easy-to-use platform is an excellent choice. Ferm Living Podia
Your membership site and your selling platform can be linked to each other through Podia’s website. This is much better than if your membership site is hosted separately from the product. Not only is this a hassle, it removes precious time that you can use to create.
Podia lets you focus more on the “creating side” of things than the business and logistics.
What Podia Can Do
Podia claims that they have everything you need to create, validate, and market online courses.
A Custom Website Builder
The custom website builder allows users to create landing pages that are specific to what your brand is selling. This custom website can be built by Podia with either a custom domain, or as a subdomain.
So podia offers you the flexibility of a more customized website and the simplicity of everything in one place.
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
An Email Marketing System
Podia lets you have an automated email marketing platform that allows for both one-time broadcasts and automated campaigns. Although you can also access this service via other websites, Podia’s tool is sufficient.
Using the one Podia provides allows you to save even more money.
Their email editor is also very elegant. It even allows you to create automated sequences that are geared depending on the buyer.
A live messaging widget
Live messaging is always important when you want to offer a fast and quick response to any questions fielded by your customers. Quick customer service is something that most people look for nowadays. WIth this live messaging widget, you are able to provide just that.
Affiliate Marketing Program Capabilities
Affiliate marketing is important especially if you want to sell your products to a wider market. Podia users have the opportunity to take advantage of the platform’s capabilities. Users can increase their reach and sales by using partner promotion.
Digital Storefronts
You won’t be allowed to showcase your products if you don’t have a place to put them. A Digital Storefront also allows you to advertise the new or featured products in your website. Podia makes it possible to create an online store that only sells your products.
This storefront can be set up by any customer without the need for programming, programming, or design skills. It’s all thanks to the no coding approach implemented by Podia.
Course Dashboard
For services like Podia, the way customers are able navigate their content is another crucial factor on which service they would like to avail. For Podia, you are able to navigate this with just a few clicks using Podia’s intuitive interface.
Uploading and sharing your lessons, whether they are videos, audio podcasts or PDF documents, has never been easier.
Drip Content
You can also control the posting schedule with Podia. Such a feature is especially important if you don’t want to blow your load of lessons at just a single opportunity.
With the drip content feature, course creators can “choose to schedule their content” at a more manageable time. This system benefits both the teacher and student (Main Podia customer), as it allows students to stay focused and not get overwhelmed.
Meanwhile with automatic Drip Content, the teacher does not need to manually update each post to give another lesson or release another product.
Payment Integrations
Of course every feature would be useless if there is no payment integration for where you are selling. Podia offers payment integrations that allow customers to pay with credit cards and PayPal worldwide. Ferm Living Podia
Membership Areas
You can set up a membership area through Podia. You can offer your customers a membership area for a monthly or annual fee. They will receive exclusive content in return. There are even giveaways you can host.
Membership areas are a great way of building customer trust and even a close community. It is a good idea to have a place you can set it up easily.
What’s Podia Like?
Of course, this wouldn’t really be a full review if we can’t tell you how the service really feels. For Podia, we will look at its Course Creation and Engagement Section, Site Design and Customization, and Sales and Marketing and see how they feel.
Course Creation and Engagement
We must first look at how Podia manages course creation. This is particularly important because this is why most users want to pay for the Podia Service.
For course creation, you can create an unlimited number of courses on Podia. There is no limit to the number of courses you can create on Podia.
As for the lessons proper, Podia allows text, embed, quiz, coaching, and files. That said, Podia offers very few lesson types. Podia also does not offer assessments, Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline, HTML5 content types, and custom codes.
It can embed, but it has a few limitations. Podia can embed lots. In fact, there are over 1900+ platforms where Podia can embed from. These include, but aren’t limited to:
- Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion for video content
- Spotify SoundCloud and PodBean Audio podcasts
- Speaker Deck, Slide Share, Presentation and Google Slides
- Twitter, TikTok, Behance, and, Pinterest
- Github, Codepen
- Google Forms, Typeform, and Paper Form
As for the side of the students, Podia made itself easy to navigate especially for your potential students. They can guide themselves through your course with no problem at all. You can use your automated emails and drip content to make for a more enjoyable experience.
For students who have completed a course, you can add a quiz to the page and give them a certificate of completion. Of course, these features are optional.
It is important to remember that Podia can only feature courses. You can sell webinars, bundles and coaching as well as digital files.
By integrating the multiple websites mentioned above, you can create webinars as well as replay of these webinars to your customers. You can even bundle them along with your courses to create a more comprehensive package.
Site design and customization
Podia provides templates for your website that will allow you to quickly get to the fun part. This is also true when making your product landing pages too.
As stated, creating your product website or your landing pages is quite easy. Each page is divided into a section wherein you can decide what to put in. You can even rearrange these pages just by dragging and dropping. The same goes for removing sections that are not needed.
For customization, Podia offers a decent amount of options. You get the basic stuff of fonts and colors as well as customizable text boxes. However, that’s almost what you get. This is why there are a lot of people who think Podia can be a little restrictive when talking about design.
That said, it seems this is what Podia has to sacrifice to maintain a ready to use and flexible website creator. Bear in mind, Podia’s site design page requires no coding. Drag and drop is all that’s required.
As for adding custom code they say it is available, but I haven’t found the option of where it is.
As stated above, Podia allows you to sell other stuff aside from courses. However, you need to have more than one digital product in the storefront for this feature to work. This is not a difficult task. Similar to how you design your websites, you can also do this for these products.
To create unique sections for each product, you can use your landing page or front page. This makes it easy for customers and students to find what they are looking for and allows them to buy the product that is right for them.
The checkout page for products is smart and simple. There is very little clutter. As such, it is easy to convert each customer into a buyer as there are no distractions taking away their attention as they are about to pay.
Podia has a good selection of customization options. It provides only the essential things needed and thus, you have no worries of being overwhelmed by the options being presented.
Podia’s design offerings may feel restrictive to some but for non-techies, the simplicity is what they could ask for. Ferm Living Podia
Marketing and Sales
Let’s lastly talk about Podia’s sales and marketing capabilities. This is an essential part of the Podia experience or any course-creating platform overall. It gives you an idea of how easy it can be to sell to potential customers.
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
You have two options for payment: Stripe and PayPal. For your payment plan, you can offer a customizable and flexible plan option for your customers. You can either give them a one time big time payment or you can spread the payment overtime.
This is entirely up to you.
Podia takes care of all aspects of payment processing so that you don’t have to worry. Stripe, a PCI compliant payment processor, securely stores your credit card and payment information.
Podia does not charge transaction fees, unlike other services. That means what you sell is yours alone and Podia does not get a cut of it. However, Stripe and PayPal fees still apply so you will have to pay those. The same applies to all platforms.
Podia provides basic tools for lead generation. You can offer both a sign-up form for the pre-launch and a sign-up form for the newsletter to collect email addresses.
You can send both automated and one-off emails through their email marketing. This allows you to send email campaigns to your customers both current and potential.
You can also customize your campaign emails to be sent in drip-out fashion and specify when they will be delivered.
However, what they provide is very basic, and as such it cannot replace your email service provider.
A real landing page capability and list management are two things that are missing. These are two very important things, but they are essential for your email marketing platform. Luckily, you can use third party integration to remedy these problems.
MailChimp and ConvertKIt are some third-party email service providers that integrate with Podia.
Podia has a Zapier integration too, which allows other email solutions that does not integrate directly to podia to pass users data via this service.
Zapier also enhances Podia’s integration to reach some other useful third-party applications like FreshBooks and ClickFunnels. Third-party scripts can be added to your website. Like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, ConvertBox, Deadline Funnel among others.
Customer Support
Podia has the best customer service in the industry. For any queries you can contact support by emailing them or using the small widget that allows you to reach support via live chat.
Other customers have noted Podia’s excellent support. The Podia team will usually respond within 5-10 minutes of you asking. That is of course provided that you contact them during work hours. You can still contact them during work hours, but it may take longer to get a reply.
Podia also has a vast knowledge base that can be used to help you do different things on the platform. If you feel like finding the answer to your question independently, you can use this resource at hand to do it themselves
If you’re on one of their paid plans, they will migrate your customers or audiences for free. They will help move your content as well as your audience from another platform to Podia free of cost. Ferm Living Podia
Price
Price is an important aspect of any review. Afterall price is one of the most important factors that may make or break your decision to avail of a service. In this case, Podia offers three types of plans: Mover ($39/mo), Shaker ($79/mo), Earthquaker($179/mo).
Prices do change from time to time. At the time this review was written, they were offering a discount on all plans. So visit the website to check out on their latest pricing.
| Plan | Free ($0 per month) | Mover ($33 per month) |
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| Plan | Shaker ($75 per month) | Earthquaker ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
At a quick glance, the Mover Plan can be enough for those just starting out. The Mover Plan by Podia could provide enough for even small-time creators.
However, the best value can be seen in the Shaker Plan which offers everything the Mover Plan has while adding Unlimited Webinars and Affiliates. As talked about earlier, these features are especially useful when talking about growing your business and such. Ferm Living Podia
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. You also get 100,000 members of the community with the Earthquaker plan.
All paid plans allow you to set up a custom domain and a matching logo for your Podia storefront.
Brands aside, the Shaker or Earthquaker plans let you remove the Podia branding from products. The Mover plan does not allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. Instead, your product will be branded with the P symbol for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. It is limited and, unlike paid plans, charges an 8$ transaction charge for all transactions.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- It is very easy to use and set up
- Instant payouts that don’t require you to wait for payment
- It is affordable for the features it provides
- No matter what customer level, they offer great support
- Integrates email marketing
- This tool allows you to track the progress of your students
- Hosts both free and paid content
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Podia offers free migration of products and customers from other websites to Podia
Cons
- Most people find course builders rigid.
- Lacks important learning tools including graded quizzes, course compliance, assignments etc.
- No mobile app feature
- Reporting tools are essential
- Not suitable for building a fully-fledged website
- Only Shaker PLan members can access the membership feature
- Email composer lacks personalization fields
- Adding team members and providing them with admin access can cost you $20 per month per admin team member.
The Verdict of Podia
We can now see what Podia can do and decide if it is worth the effort.
Amidst the competition, Podia is steadily gaining ground as a player in e-learning. This is probably because of its less complicated and easy to use user interface.
While most customer’s common complaint about Podia is its limited and “rigid” design. However for people who have limited knowledge on designing websites, such a feature is a god send. Ferm Living Podia
With the influx of people bringing their businesses online, an easy to get and easy to understand UI can bring the focus back to the “creation” part of content creation and less with dealing on the logistics and admin side.
Podia’s price is another highlight. It is fairly cheap compared to other course-creation services. With an amount that’s lower than $50,you can almost set up your website to a functional state.
Sure, there might be a limit to what it can do, but you can think of it this way. You can Podia’s Mover plan to test the waters while getting the hang around of things. Sometimes simplicity is the best option. Over-features can overwhelm users and cause them to lose their sense of control.
We should also pay attention to their customer service. With a customer service that responds quickly and efficiently to queries, it is easy to overlook the absence of a telephone number for assistance. They have people who will will answer your questions on the clock as long as its work hours.
Podia is a great service, especially for people who are just getting started with the internet. Podia has all the essentials needed to create a website that is successful without being overwhelming.
I would highly recommend this site t
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
Frequently Asked Questions
Ferm Living Podia
Which Plan is the best option to get when I buy my Podia subscription?
The Shaker Plan is the best.
At $79 per month, you can get most features with additional stuff that are not available at the Mover Tier. Affiliate marketing is possible, as well as the ability to integrate other apps and services such Zoom.
What are Podia’s payment plans?
Podia uses Stripe and Paypal to process payments.
Customers and students can pay by paypal, credit or debit card for products.
Podia: Why use it?
You can use Podia if you are looking for a platform that is extremely easy to use.
Another reason to choose podia over other competitors is that it does not charge transaction fees. Furthermore, it has good and reliable customer service. It also has a low price.
What Products can you make with Podia?
You can create online courses with Podia.
Aside from that, you can also make digital downloads, community memberships, and webinars and coaching.