Knowledge is the greatest gift that life has to offer. Life would not be the same without the knowledge that we have today.
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. 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.
In my opinion, what the internet really did best was to democratize knowledge in a scale that had been unseen since the rise of instructional films and even the invention of the printing press even before that.
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 Podia Health
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.
Podia gives you the tools and hosts your online courses.
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. 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 launched in 2014 and behind it is a guy named Spencer Fry.
Fry wanted a platform to give online creators an easier way to sell their products and connect with their audiences. 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. 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. 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.
This lack of focus may even be the cause of why your business is going into decline. Podia’s easy-to-use platform is an excellent choice. Podia Health
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. 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 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
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.
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 < <
An 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. 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. Quick customer service is something that most people look for nowadays. This widget allows you to communicate with customers instantly.
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
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. 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.
Putting up and uploading your lessons be it videos, audio podcasts, PDF document downloads, ebooks and more, have never been this easy.
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 Health
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. 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. 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.
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. In fact, there are over 1900+ platforms where Podia can embed from. These include, but aren’t limited to:
- Dailymotion, vimeo and Youtube for video content
- Spotify SoundCloud, and PodBean for Audio podcasts
- Slide Share, Presentation, and Speaker Deck
- Twitter, TikTok and Behance.
- 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. 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. 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. These pages can be rearranged by simply 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Speaking of buying, the checkout page for the products has a smart and simple design. There is little to no 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. Podia Health
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. 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.
As for the payment processing, Podia handles everything for you, so you don’t need to worry about anything. 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. You will still have to pay Stripe and PayPal fees. 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.
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. 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. You can even add third-party scripts 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. 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 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 move your content and your audience from any other platform to Podia at no cost. Podia Health
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 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 ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
At a quick glance, the Mover Plan can be enough for those just starting out. Even for small time creators, what Podia offers in the Mover Plan could be enough.
However, the best value can be seen in the Shaker Plan which offers everything the Mover Plan has while adding Unlimited Webinars and Affiliates. These features are particularly useful for growing your business, as we have already mentioned. Podia Health
Meanwhile, the Earthquaker plan is something for those looking to go all out on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. The Earthquaker plan also gives you 100,000 community members.
All paid plans allow you to set up a custom domain and a matching logo for your Podia storefront.
Brands aside, the Shaker or Earthquaker plans let you remove the Podia branding from products. The Mover plan does not allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. Instead, your product will be branded with the P symbol for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. However, it is very limited and unlike the paid plans, it takes an 8$ transaction fee from all your transactions.
Both the pros and cons
Pros
- Super easy to use and setup
- Instant payouts that does not make you wait to be paid
- It is affordable for the features it provides
- Offers great support no matter the customer tier
- 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
- Most people find course builders rigid.
- Lacks important learning tools including graded quizzes, course compliance, assignments etc.
- 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
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. This feature is great for those with limited web design knowledge. Podia Health
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 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. 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
Podia Health
What plan is best to choose when I purchase my Podia subscription
The Shaker Plan is the best.
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.
Your customers and students can pay with paypal or through credit or debit card to pay for your products.
Podia: Why use it?
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. Furthermore, it has good and reliable 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.