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. 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.
There are also those who learn on their own. 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.
The internet revolution followed. 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.
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.
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 Merkabah
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. 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 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. It could also be coaching, webinars, community, as well as other digital products.
The company behind Podia has New York City as its headquarters. 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. 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
Podia: Why do you use it?
Despite the number of online platforms available on the internet, Podia still stands out especially due to its creator-friendly policies. Podia has a digital shopfront that allows for instant payment from sales and does not charge any transaction fees. Yes, podia does not charge any transaction fees.
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.
Even for those who already have an established digital content, Podia is still a very viable platform to transfer to. 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 Merkabah
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 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.
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. While you can avail of this service through other websites, the tool that Podia provides you is already enough.
You can save even more money by using the one Podia offers.
The email editor is very user-friendly. You can even create automated sequences that are tailored to the buyer.
A live messaging widget
Live messaging is always important when you want to offer a fast and quick response to any questions fielded by your customers. People nowadays want quick customer service. This widget allows you to communicate with customers instantly.
Capabilities of Affiliate Marketing Program
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. Users can increase their reach and sales by using partner promotion.
Digital Storefronts
Of course, you won’t be able to show your products without a place to display 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. It’s all thanks to the no coding approach implemented by Podia.
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.
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. 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 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.
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 Merkabah
Member 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 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 is 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
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.
You can create unlimited courses with 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. Podia has 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. These include, but aren’t limited to:
- Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion for video content
- Spotify SoundCloud and PodBean 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. Your students can navigate your course easily. 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.
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.
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. The same goes for removing sections that are not needed.
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. This is why there are a lot of people who think Podia can be a little restrictive when talking about 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.
As stated above, Podia allows you to sell other stuff aside from courses. This feature requires that you have at least one digital product on your storefront. 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. 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 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. You won’t feel overwhelmed by all the options available.
Although Podia’s design offerings might seem restrictive to some, for others the simplicity of Podia’s designs is all they need. Podia Merkabah
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. You can either give them a one time big time payment or you can spread the payment overtime.
This is entirely 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.
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. 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 to send email campaigns to your customers both current and potential.
You can also customize your campaign emails to be sent in drip-out fashion and specify when they will be delivered.
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. 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. You can email support with any questions or use the widget to chat live.
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. 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. 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 Merkabah
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. So visit the website to check out on their latest pricing.
| Plan | No cost ($0 per Month) | Mover ($33 per month) |
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| Plan | Shaker ($75 per month) | Earthquaker ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
At a quick glance, the Mover Plan can be enough for those just starting out. The Mover Plan by Podia could provide enough for even small-time creators.
However, the best value can be seen in the Shaker Plan which offers everything the Mover Plan has while adding Unlimited Webinars and Affiliates. These features are particularly useful for growing your business, as we have already mentioned. Podia Merkabah
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. It actually benefits most who are looking for a bigger business. The Earthquaker plan also gives you 100,000 community members.
All paid plans allow you to set up a custom domain and a matching logo for your Podia storefront.
Brands aside, the Shaker or Earthquaker plans let you remove the Podia branding from products. This is not true with the Mover plan and your product will have that P branding that stands for Podai.
An important thing to note is that Podia offers a free plan. However, it is very limited and unlike the paid plans, it takes an 8$ 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
- Has affordable price for the features it offers
- No matter what customer level, they offer great support
- Has integrated email marketing
- Gives you the ability track student progress
- 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 essential
- 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.
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. Its user interface is simpler and more intuitive.
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 Merkabah
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.
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
Podia Merkabah
Which Plan is the best option to get when I buy 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.
Your customers and students can pay with paypal or through credit or debit card to pay for your products.
Podia: Why use it?
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. It also offers reliable and excellent customer service. It also has a low price.
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.