Knowledge is the greatest gift that life has to offer. Without the knowledge we currently have, life would have been really really different and so is our way of life.
For most of human history, the way we learn and give knowledge has remained largely unchanged. 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.
Then there are those who learn by themselves. Advancements in reading and writing have made self-study possible. 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. The internet revolution has been widely believed to have transformed education and learning. However, the internet did not change the way people consume and receive 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.
Teachers and teachers of the heart were able to share their knowledge via the internet to people they didn’t know. 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. Now, we have dedicated websites that act as a platform for 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 Overflow Podia
Podia allows users to share their knowledge online and make money. Podia customers create online courses that can be tailored to their students. They can then put these courses on the platform and sell them to their own customers.
In a way, Podia not only gives you tools to create an online course, it also hosts them.
Podia’s market is not limited to online courses. Podia is one of the most popular digital content selling platforms. These content could include the mentioned online courses. It could also be coaching, webinars, community, as well as other digital products.
Podia is headquartered in New York City. It has additional offices also 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 wanted a platform to give online creators an easier way to sell their products and connect with their audiences. He wanted the experience to be less hassle, but at the same time, provide these people with a welcoming and communal environment.
This resulted in Podia the website, which is intuitive, powerful and user friendly tool that was designed 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. With an intuitive and comprehensive platform, creatives are able to execute their great ideas and visions even if they lack the technical know-how.
Podia makes it simple to get digital content on the market.
Even for those who already have an established digital content, Podia is still a very viable platform to transfer to. Some digital platforms offer too many features and could be considered overkill. Too many options may look fine at first, however it could lead to an overwhelming experience.
Your business may be in decline because of this lack of focus. That is why Podia’s simple and easy to get platform is a much better option. Overflow Podia
Podia’s website also allows your membership site as well as your selling platform to be integrated with each other. This is much better than if your membership site is hosted separately from the product. This is not only a hassle but it also takes away valuable time that you could have spent creating.
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 < <
A 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.
You can save even more money by using the one Podia offers.
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
If you want to respond quickly to customers’ questions, live messaging is a great option. People nowadays want quick customer service. WIth this live messaging widget, you are able to provide just that.
Affiliate Marketing Program Capabilities
Affiliate marketing is essential if you wish to expand your product line. Podia users have the opportunity to take advantage of the platform’s capabilities. By using partner promotion, users can widen their audience as well as exponentially enhance the number of sales
Digital Storefronts
Of course, you won’t be able to show your products without a place to display 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.
Any customer can set-up this storefront even without the coding, programming or even the design skills to do this. Podia has a no-coding approach that allows you to do this.
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. With Podia’s intuitive interface, it is easy to navigate these pages with just a few clicks.
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’s payment integrations include credit cards, PayPal payments for customers worldwide. Overflow Podia
Membership Areas
Through Podia, you can create a membership area for your customers. You can offer your customers a membership area for a monthly or annual fee. They will receive exclusive content in return. You can even host giveaways there.
Membership Areas are also a great way to build customer trust and even a tight community, so having a prepared place where you can easily set it up is surely a welcome one.
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. It also lacks assessments, Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, HTML5 content types and custom codes.
It can embed, but it has a few limitations. Podia can embed lots. Podia can embed on over 1900+ platforms. This include but are not limited to
- Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion for video content
- Spotify SoundCloud, and PodBean for Audio podcasts
- Slide Share, Presentation, and Speaker Deck
- Twitter, TikTok, Behance, and, Pinterest
- Github and Codepen
- Typeform, Paper Form, and Google Forms
Podia was designed to make it easy for students. Your students can navigate your course easily. To make it more enjoyable, you can use your drip content and automated emails.
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. The service allows you to sell webinars, bundles, coaching, as well as other 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 holds true for product landing pages as well.
As stated, creating your product website or your landing pages is quite easy. You can choose what you want to include on each page. You can even rearrange these pages just by dragging and dropping. You can also remove sections that you don’t need.
Podia has a good selection of customization options. You get the basic stuff of fonts and colors as well as customizable text boxes. But that’s not all you get. Many people think that Podia can be too restrictive when it comes to design.
Podia must make this sacrifice in order to keep his website design page flexible and ready-to-use. Bear in mind, Podia’s site design page requires no coding. Drag and drop is all that’s required.
They say that custom code can be added, but I have not found the location.
Podia lets you sell other things, in addition to courses. This feature requires that you have at least one digital product on your storefront. 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.
Speaking of buying, the checkout page for the products has a smart and simple design. 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.
Overall, when it comes to customization, Podia offers a decent number of features. 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. Overflow Podia
Marketing and Sales
Lastly, let’s talk about Podia’s marketing and sales 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. You can offer your customers a flexible and customizable payment plan. Either you give them a lump sum payment, or spread it out over time.
It is up to you.
As for the payment processing, Podia handles everything for you, so you don’t need to worry about anything. As for credit card and payment information, it is all securely stored by Stripe, a PCI-compliant payment processor.
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. You will still have to pay Stripe and PayPal fees. This is the same throughout all available platforms.
As for the marketing side, Podia offers some basic lead generation tools. 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 send email campaigns to both existing and potential customers.
You can even customize your campaign emails in a drip out fashion, and define when the emails will be sent.
However, what they provide is very basic, and as such it cannot replace your email service provider.
Some things that are lacking include a real landing page capability, and list management. Two very basic things but are entirely essential when doing 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.
Zapier allows Podia to integrate with other email solutions, which allows podia users to share their data through 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. You can add third-party scripts to your website, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and ConvertBox.
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. Generally speaking, the Podia team will give you a response in 5-10 minutes from asking. That is of course provided that you contact them during work hours. Outside that, you can still get a response, but it takes a longer time.
Podia also offers their own extensive knowledge library that can be used as a reference on how to 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
Lastly, one of their favorite features is their free offer to migrate your customers and audiences if you are on one of their paid plans. They will help move your content as well as your audience from another platform to Podia free of cost. Overflow Podia
Price
Of course any review is not complete without talking about price. Price is a key factor that can make or break your decision about whether you want to use a service. In this case, Podia offers three types of plans: Mover ($39/mo), Shaker ($79/mo), Earthquaker($179/mo).
Prices can change from time-to-time. For example: at the time of writing this review, they are currently offering a discount to all their 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 ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
At a quick glance, the Mover Plan can be enough for those just starting out. Even for small time creators, what Podia offers in the Mover Plan could be enough.
The Shaker Plan offers the most value, as it includes everything in the Mover Plan and adds unlimited webinars and affiliates. These features are particularly useful for growing your business, as we have already mentioned. Overflow Podia
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. The Earthquaker plan also gives you 100,000 community members.
All paid plans allow you to set up a custom domain and a matching logo for your Podia storefront.
Speaking of brands, the Shaker and Earthquaker plans allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. This is not true with the Mover plan and your product will have that P branding that stands for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. It is limited and, unlike paid plans, charges an 8$ transaction charge for all transactions.
Both the pros and cons
Pros
- Super easy to use and setup
- Instant payouts that don’t require you to wait for payment
- Has affordable price for the features it offers
- 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
- Offers free migration of customers and products from other websites to Podia
Cons
- Course builders can feel rigid to most people
- Lacks important learning tools including graded quizzes, course compliance, assignments etc.
- No mobile app feature
- Reporting tools are basic
- Not suitable for building a fully-fledged website
- Membership feature is only available in the Shaker PLan
- Email composer lacks personalization fields
- You can add team members to your admin team for $20 per month.
Podia the Verdict
Now that we’ve seen what Podia can do, we can finally judge if availing of the website is all worth it.
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.
Podia’s “rigid” and limited design is the most common complaint from customers. However for people who have limited knowledge on designing websites, such a feature is a god send. Overflow Podia
An easy-to-use and understand UI is key to allowing people to focus on content creation instead of the logistics.
Another highlight in Podia’s case is its price point. This course-creation service is quite affordable compared to others. You can set up your website in a functional state with a cost of less than $50
There might be limits to what it can do but it is possible to think about it this way. Podia’s Mover allows you to try the waters and get the hang of it. Sometimes simplicity is the best option. Over-features can overwhelm users and cause them to lose their sense of control.
Their customer service is also something that we should take note of. With a customer service that responds quickly and efficiently to queries, it is easy to overlook the absence of a telephone number for assistance. You can count on them to answer all your questions, no matter what time it is.
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.
This site is highly recommended.
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
Frequently Asked Questions
Overflow Podia
Which Plan is the best option to get when I buy my Podia subscription?
The Shaker Plan is the best.
You can get the most features and additional stuff at $79 per month. Some of which includes affiliate marketing and the ability to integrate many other apps and services like Zoom.
What are Podia’s payment plans?
Podia uses Stripe and Paypal to process payments.
Your customers and students can pay with paypal or through credit or debit card to pay for your products.
Why Use Podia?
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. Lastly, it is has a very low price point.
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.