Knowledge is one of life’s greatest gifts to mankind. Without the knowledge we currently have, life would have been really really different and so is our way of life.
The way we give and gain knowledge remained mostly unchanged for most of history. This usually involves a teacher/student relationship or a master/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 instruction books, anyone can learn without the need for a teacher or 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 enabled education and knowledge to cross borders without the need for visas or a flight ticket.
Most of it began on unorthodox websites like vimeo and youtube, but some even started as 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. Do check out our article below, however, because it has a comprehensive overview of Podia.
Podia a Brief Overview Podia And Shopify
Podia allows users to share their knowledge online and make money. Basically, Podia customers make online courses that they can tailor to their students. They can then put these courses on the platform and sell them to their own customers.
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.
Podia is headquartered in New York City. 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.
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. It has a digital storefronts that offers instant payout from sales while not even asking for any transaction fees. Yes, podia does not charge any transaction fees.
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. 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. Podia And Shopify
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.
In short, using Podia allows you to focus on the “creating” side of things rather than the logistics and business side.
What Podia Can Do
Podia promotes themselves as ” Everything you need to know about creating, validating, and marketing online courses, all in one convenient place.” As such, to be able to back this claim, the platform has a bunch of features geared exactly for that.
A Custom Website Builder
Their custom website builder enables users to create custom landing pages that suit what you ad your brand are 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 allows you to have an automated email marketing system that allows you to send one-time broadcasts, as well as automated campaigns. While you can avail of this service through other websites, the tool that Podia provides you is already enough.
Using the one Podia provides allows you to save even more money.
The email editor is very user-friendly. You can even create automated sequences that are tailored to the buyer.
A live messaging widget
If you want to respond quickly to customers’ questions, live messaging is a great option. Quick customer service is something that most people look for nowadays. WIth this live messaging widget, you are able to provide just that.
Capabilities of Affiliate Marketing Program
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 allows you to build an online store that holds your products exclusively.
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
Podia is a service where customers can navigate their content easily. This is a crucial factor in deciding which service they want to use. 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
Podia also gives you control on the schedule of your posting. This is particularly important if you don’t want to take on too many lessons at once.
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. Podia And Shopify
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
First and foremost, we should tackle how the Podia handles course creation. This is especially crucial as of course, this is the main reason why users would like to pay for the Podia Service.
You can create unlimited courses with Podia. There is no limit to the number of courses you can create on Podia.
Podia supports text, embeds, quizzes, coaching and files for lessons. Podia has very few lesson types. It also lacks assessments, Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, HTML5 content types and custom codes.
However what it lacks, it can embed and Podia can embed a lot. Podia can embed on over 1900+ platforms. This include but are not limited to
- Dailymotion, vimeo and Youtube for video content
- Spotify SoundCloud and PodBean Audio podcasts
- Speaker Deck, Slide Share, Presentation and Google Slides
- 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.
Another thing to note is that courses are just the tip of the iceberg on what products you can feature in Podia. The service allows you to sell webinars, bundles, coaching, as well as other digital files.
You can make webinars and offer replays of the webinars to your customers by integrating multiple websites. To make a complete package, you can also bundle them with your courses.
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.
Podia has a good selection of customization options. Podia offers both the basics of fonts and colors, as well as customizable text box options. 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.
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. You can do the same for these products like how you designed your websites.
You can use the front page or landing page of your website to create sections that are unique for each product. That way, it is simple for your students and customers to navigate and buy what they need.
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.
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. Podia And Shopify
Marketing and sales
Let’s lastly talk about Podia’s sales and marketing capabilities. This is also an important part of the Podia experience, or any course-creating platform in general as this gives you an idea how easy it is to sell to your potential customers.
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
For the basics, Podia has two payment options you can use: Stripe or PayPal. You can offer your customers a flexible and customizable payment plan. You can either give them a one time big time payment or you can spread the payment overtime.
It is 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.
Unlike other services, Podia offers no transaction fees. 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.
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.
But, they are very basic and cannot replace your email service provider.
Some things that are lacking include a real landing page capability, and list management. These are two very important things, but they are essential for your email marketing platform. These problems can be solved with third-party integration.
Some third party email service providers that have native integration with Podia include MailChimp, ConvertKIt, Drip, Active Campaign, GetResponse, and MailerLite.
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. You can even add third-party scripts to your website. You can add third-party scripts to your website, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and ConvertBox.
Customer Support
Podia’s customer support is among the best in the business. For any queries you can contact support by emailing them or using the small widget that allows you to reach support via live chat.
Podia has received praises from other customers for their excellent customer service. The Podia team will usually respond within 5-10 minutes of you asking. This is provided you reach them during working 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
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. Podia And Shopify
Price
Of course any review is not complete without talking about price. 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 ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
The Mover Plan is a great option for anyone just starting out. The Mover Plan by Podia could provide enough for even small-time creators.
However, the best value can be seen in the Shaker Plan which offers everything the Mover Plan has while adding Unlimited Webinars and Affiliates. These features are particularly useful for growing your business, as we have already mentioned. Podia And Shopify
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. It actually benefits most who are looking for a bigger business. You also get 100,000 members of the community with the Earthquaker plan.
All the paid plans also allow you to create a custom domain for your Podia storefront as well as a logo that matches up with your brand.
Brands aside, the Shaker or Earthquaker plans let you remove the Podia branding from products. The Mover plan does not allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. Instead, your product will be branded with the P symbol for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. It is limited and, unlike paid plans, charges an 8$ transaction charge for all transactions.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- It is very easy to use and set up
- Instant payouts that does not make you wait to be paid
- It is affordable for the features it provides
- No matter what customer level, they offer great support
- Has integrated 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
- 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
- This is not the right platform for building a full-fledged website.
- Only Shaker PLan members can access the membership feature
- 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.
Podia continues to gain ground in e-learning despite all the competition. 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. This feature is great for those with limited web design knowledge. Podia And Shopify
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.
Another highlight in Podia’s case is its price point. 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. Podia’s Mover allows you to try the waters and get the hang of it. Sometimes simplicity is key. 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 who answers queries fast and efficiently, one could even forgive the lack of a phone channel to ask for help. They have people who will will answer your questions on the clock as long as its work hours.
Overall, Podia is an excellent service especially for those who are just starting to get the hang of bringing their stuff on the online world. 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 < <
Most Frequently Asked Questions
Podia And Shopify
Which Plan is the best option to get when I buy my Podia subscription?
The Shaker Plan is the best one to get.
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 Paypal and Stripe for processing payments.
Customers and students can pay by paypal, credit or debit card for 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. It also has a low price.
What Products can you make with Podia?
You can create online courses with Podia.
You can also download community memberships, webinars, coaching, and other digital content.