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.
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.
The internet revolution followed. 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. 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 Digital Downloads
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 is not limited to online courses. In fact, Podia is among the best of many all-in-one 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. It has additional offices also in Austin Texas. It is fairly new but somehow old by internet standards. It launched in 2014 and behind it is a guy named Spencer Fry.
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?
Despite the number of online platforms available on the internet, Podia still stands out especially due to 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. 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 even makes it easy to navigate the hurdle of getting the digital content to 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. Podia Digital Downloads
Your membership site and your selling platform can be linked to each other through Podia’s website. This is preferable to most cases where the membership site is hosted separately from your product. Not only is this a hassle, it removes precious time that you can use to create.
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
The custom website builder allows users to create landing pages that are specific to what your brand is selling. Podia offers you to build this custom website with a custom domain or as a subdomain to Podia.
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.
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. 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 can take advantage of the capabilities afforded by the platform. 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. You can also advertise new or featured products on your digital storefront. 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. This is particularly important if you don’t want to take on too many lessons at once.
Course creators have the option to “choose when they want to schedule their content”. This system benefits both the teacher and student (Main Podia customer), as it allows students to stay focused and not get overwhelmed.
Automatic Drip Content means that the teacher doesn’t have to manually modify each post in order to add another lesson or create a 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 Digital Downloads
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. 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?
This review wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t give you a true picture of the service. 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 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. 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. 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. Podia can embed on over 1900+ platforms. These include, but aren’t 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
Podia was designed to make it easy for 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.
You can even add in a quiz and offer a certificate of completion to your students for completing a course. 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.
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.
It is easy to create your product website, or landing pages. 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.
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. 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.
Podia lets you sell other things, in addition to courses. This feature requires that you have at least one digital product on your storefront. That is an easy job though. Similar to how you design your websites, you can also do this for these products.
You can use the front page or landing page of your website to create sections that are unique for each product. 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 little to no clutter. It is simple to convert every customer into a buyer because there are no distractions distracting their attention while they pay.
Podia has a good selection of customization options. You won’t feel overwhelmed by all the options available.
Podia’s design offerings may feel restrictive to some but for non-techies, the simplicity is what they could ask for. Podia Digital Downloads
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 < <
For the basics, Podia has two payment options you can use: Stripe or 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.
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.
Unlike other services, Podia offers no transaction fees. This means that the sale is yours and Podia doesn’t get any commission. 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. They even allow you to offer a pre-launch sign-up form as well as a newsletter signup form to collect email addresses.
Their email marketing allows you to send automated emails as well as one-off emails. 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.
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.
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 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. Like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, ConvertBox, Deadline Funnel among others.
Customer Support
Podia’s customer support is among the best in the business. You can email support with any questions or use the widget to chat live.
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. 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
If you’re on one of their paid plans, they will migrate your customers or audiences for free. They will move your content and your audience from any other platform to Podia at no cost. Podia Digital Downloads
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. At the time this review was written, they were offering a discount on all 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 ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
At a quick glance, the Mover Plan can be enough for those just starting out. Even for small time creators, what Podia offers in the Mover Plan could be enough.
The Shaker Plan offers the most value, as it includes everything in the Mover Plan and adds unlimited webinars and affiliates. As talked about earlier, these features are especially useful when talking about growing your business and such. Podia Digital Downloads
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. You also get 100,000 members of the community with the Earthquaker plan.
All paid plans allow you to set up a custom domain and a matching logo for your Podia storefront.
Speaking of brands, the Shaker and Earthquaker plans allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. This is not true with the Mover plan and your product will have that P branding that stands for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. It is limited and, unlike paid plans, charges an 8$ transaction charge for all transactions.
Both the pros and cons
Pros
- Super easy to use and setup
- Instant payouts that does not make you wait to be paid
- 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 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
- Important learning tools are missing, such as graded quizzes, course compliance, and assignments.
- No mobile app feature
- Reporting tools are basic
- This is not the right platform for building a full-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.
The Verdict of Podia
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.
While most customer’s common complaint about Podia is its limited and “rigid” design. This feature is great for those with limited web design knowledge. Podia Digital Downloads
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. 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. Too many features could be overkill and might overwhelm the user.
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.
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. They have the basic necessities needed by someone to put up a successful website without overwhelming then.
I would highly recommend this site t
> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
Frequently Asked Questions
Podia Digital Downloads
What plan is best to choose when I purchase my Podia subscription
The Shaker Plan is the best one to get.
You can get the most features and additional stuff at $79 per month. 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.
Why Use Podia?
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform, Podia is the right choice.
Other reasons why you should choose podia over its competitors is because it takes no 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?
The main thing that you can do with Podia is to create online courses.
Aside from that, you can also make digital downloads, community memberships, and webinars and coaching.