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.
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. One mostly provides the instruction, while the other receives it.
Then there are those who learn by themselves. 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.
Most of it began on unorthodox websites like vimeo and youtube, but some even started as 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. Do check out our article below, however, because it has a comprehensive overview of Podia.
Podia a Brief Overview Podia Circa 2021
Podia is an online platform that allows people to share their knowledge of different things while also making 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.
In a way, Podia not only gives you tools to create an online course, it also hosts them.
Podia’s market does not only cover online courses. In fact, Podia is among the best of many all-in-one digital content selling platforms. This content could be the aforementioned 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. Although it is relatively new, it seems somewhat old in internet terms. 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. Yep, that’s right, podia takes no money for any transaction you make.
Podia extends its creator-friendly policies in the way their platform works. 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 even makes it easy to navigate the hurdle of getting the digital content to 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. 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. Podia Circa 2021
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. 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 claims that they have everything you need to create, validate, and market online courses.
A Custom Website Builder
Their custom website builder enables users to create custom landing pages that suit what you ad your brand are selling. Podia offers you to build this custom website with a custom domain or as a subdomain to Podia.
Thus, podia gives you the advantage of a more custom website or the simplicity of having everything all 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.
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
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 important especially if you want to sell your products to a wider market. Podia users can take advantage of the capabilities afforded by the platform. By using partner promotion, users can widen their audience as well as exponentially enhance the number of sales
Digital Storefronts
You won’t be allowed to showcase your products if you don’t have a place to put them. You can also advertise new or featured products on your digital storefront. 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. For Podia, you are able to navigate this with just a few clicks using Podia’s intuitive interface.
Putting up and uploading your lessons be it videos, audio podcasts, PDF document downloads, ebooks and more, have never been this easy.
Drip Content
You can also control the posting schedule with Podia. 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 benefits both the student and the teacher (Main Podia customer) as this system allows the student to avoid being overwhelmed and burnt out of the course.
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
Without payment integration, every feature is useless. Podia’s payment integrations include credit cards, PayPal payments for customers worldwide. Podia Circa 2021
Membership Areas
You can set up a membership area through Podia. A membership area is an option you can sell to your customers for a monthly or yearly fee where they get special and 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 is Podia like?
Of course, this wouldn’t really be a full review if we can’t tell you how the service really feels. We will be looking at Podia’s Course Creation and Engagement Section as well as Site Design and Customization and Sales and Marketing to see how they feel.
Course Creation and Engagement
We must first look at how Podia manages course creation. This is especially crucial as of course, this is the main reason why users would like to pay for the Podia Service.
For course creation, you can create an unlimited number of courses on Podia. This means that there is no limit and no additional fees whenever you feel offering a new course.
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. In fact, there are over 1900+ platforms where Podia can embed from. 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
- 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. 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. These features can be added or removed at your discretion.
Another thing to note is that courses are just the tip of the iceberg on what products you can feature in Podia. 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 holds true for product landing pages as well.
It is easy to create your product website, or landing pages. You can choose what you want to include on each page. These pages can be rearranged by simply dragging and dropping. You can also remove sections that you don’t need.
For customization, Podia offers a decent amount of 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. It is all drag and drop.
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. That is an easy job though. 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. 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. It is simple to convert every customer into a buyer because there are no distractions distracting their attention while they 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.
Although Podia’s design offerings might seem restrictive to some, for others the simplicity of Podia’s designs is all they need. Podia Circa 2021
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 < <
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. This means that the sale is yours and Podia doesn’t get any commission. 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. They even allow you to offer a pre-launch sign-up form as well as a newsletter signup form 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 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.
A real landing page capability and list management are two things that are missing. 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.
Some third party email service providers that have native integration with Podia include MailChimp, ConvertKIt, Drip, Active Campaign, GetResponse, and MailerLite.
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 allows you to connect Podia with other third-party applications such as FreshBooks or 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 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.
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. Outside that, you can still get a response, but it takes a longer time.
Podia also has a vast knowledge base that can be used to help you do different things on the platform. You can also use this resource to find the answer to your question yourself if you prefer to search it on your own.
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. Podia Circa 2021
Price
Price is an important aspect of any review. 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 do change from time to time. For example: at the time of writing this review, they are currently offering a discount to all their plans. Visit the website to see their most recent pricing.
Plan | Free ($0 per month) | Mover ($33 per month) |
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Plan | Shaker ($75 per month) | Earthquaker ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
The Mover Plan is a great option for anyone just starting out. Even for small time creators, what Podia offers in the Mover Plan could be enough.
The Shaker Plan offers the most value, as it includes everything in the Mover Plan and adds unlimited webinars and affiliates. As talked about earlier, these features are especially useful when talking about growing your business and such. Podia Circa 2021
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. You also get 100,000 members of the community with the Earthquaker plan.
All the paid plans also allow you to create a custom domain for your Podia storefront as well as a logo that matches up with your brand.
Speaking of brands, the Shaker and Earthquaker plans allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. This is not true with the Mover plan and your product will have that P branding that stands for Podai.
Important to remember is that Podia provides a free plan. However, it is very limited and unlike the paid plans, it takes an 8$ transaction fee from all your transactions.
Both the pros and cons
Pros
- It is very easy to use and set up
- Instant payouts that don’t require you to wait for payment
- Has affordable price for the features it offers
- Offers great support no matter the customer tier
- Integrates email marketing
- Gives you the ability track student progress
- Hosts can host both paid and free content
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Podia offers free migration of products and customers 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 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
- 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.
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 Circa 2021
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. 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. You can Podia’s Mover plan to test the waters while getting the hang around of things. Sometimes simplicity is key. Too many features could be overkill and might overwhelm the user.
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. They have the basic necessities needed by someone to put up a successful website without overwhelming then.
This site is highly recommended.
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
Most Frequently Asked Questions
Podia Circa 2021
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 Paypal and Stripe for processing payments.
Your customers and students can pay with paypal or through credit or debit card to pay for your products.
Why Use Podia?
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform, Podia is the right choice.
Another reason to choose podia over other competitors is that it does not charge transaction fees. It also offers reliable and excellent customer service. Lastly, it is has a very low price point.
What products can you make using Podia?
You can create online courses with Podia.
Aside from that, you can also make digital downloads, community memberships, and webinars and coaching.