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. 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.
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.
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 enabled education and knowledge to cross borders without the need for visas or a flight ticket.
While most of it started on unlikely websites such as youtube and vimeo, or maybe even written 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. To get a comprehensive overview of Podia, you may still want to check out our article below.
Podia a Brief Overview Podia Online Courses
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. 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. This content could be the aforementioned 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. He wanted the experience to be less hassle, but at the same time, provide these people with a welcoming and communal environment.
Podia, a website that is intuitive, powerful, and user-friendly, was created 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. 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 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. 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 Online Courses
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
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 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.
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 essential if you wish to expand your product line. 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
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.
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
Without payment integration, every feature is useless. Podia’s payment integrations include credit cards, PayPal payments for customers worldwide. Podia Online Courses
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
We must first look at how Podia manages 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. Podia also does not offer assessments, Adobe Captivate or 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. These include, but aren’t 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 and Behance.
- Github and Codepen
- Typeform, Paper Form, and Google Forms
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. You can use your automated emails and drip content to make for a more enjoyable experience.
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
For your websites, Podia offers templates that allow you to get on the exciting part easily and quickly. This holds true for product landing pages as well.
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. The same goes for removing sections that are not needed.
Podia has a good selection of customization 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. It is all drag and drop.
As for adding custom code they say it is available, but I haven’t found the option of where it is.
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. That is an easy job though. 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 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.
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 Online Courses
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. 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. This is the same throughout all available 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.
Their email marketing allows you to send automated emails as well as one-off emails. 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.
However, what they provide is very basic, and as such it cannot replace your email service provider.
A real landing page capability and list management are two things that are missing. These are two very important things, but they are essential for your email marketing platform. These problems can be solved with third-party integration.
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 allows you to connect Podia with other third-party applications such as FreshBooks or ClickFunnels. Third-party scripts can be added 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. 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. 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. 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 Online Courses
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 ($33 per month) |
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> > Click Here to Check Out Podia < <
The Mover Plan is a great option for anyone just starting out. The Mover Plan by Podia could provide enough for even small-time creators.
However, the best value can be seen in the Shaker Plan which offers everything the Mover Plan has while adding Unlimited Webinars and Affiliates. These features are particularly useful for growing your business, as we have already mentioned. Podia Online Courses
The Earthquaker plan, however, is for those who want to spend a lot on their subscription. This plan is beneficial to most people who are interested in a larger business. You also get 100,000 members of the community with the Earthquaker plan.
All the paid plans also allow you to create a custom domain for your Podia storefront as well as a logo that matches up with your brand.
Speaking of brands, the Shaker and Earthquaker plans allow you to remove the Podia branding from your products. This is not true with the Mover plan and your product will have that P branding that stands for Podai.
Important to remember is that Podia provides a free plan. However, it is very limited and unlike the paid plans, it takes an 8$ transaction fee from all your transactions.
Both the pros and cons
Pros
- It is very easy to use and set up
- Instant payouts that 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
- Integrates 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
- Not suitable for building a fully-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.
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.
While most customer’s common complaint about Podia is its limited and “rigid” design. However for people who have limited knowledge on designing websites, such a feature is a god send. Podia Online Courses
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. You can set up your website in a functional state with a cost of less than $50
Sure, there might be a limit to what it can do, but you can think of it this way. You can Podia’s Mover plan to test the waters while getting the hang around of things. Sometimes simplicity is the best option. 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. You can count on them to answer all your questions, no matter what time it is.
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 Online Courses
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 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.
Why Use Podia?
You can use Podia if you are looking for a platform that is extremely easy to use.
Other reasons why you should choose podia over its competitors is because it takes no 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.