Podia Review – Is It Best Course Selling Platform in 2022?

Looking for an in-depth Podia review? Don’t worry, you have reached the right place. 

In this post, we have featured the Podia review that includes detailed insights such as features, pricing plan, and ease of use. 

So let’s dive right into the post.

If in hurry, you can quickly read our bottom line and take the decision.

Podia is an amazing all in one platform for digital creators who want to sell their course, skills, and expertise online. Podia outranks most of the platforms as it offers premium services at a reasonable price.

With Podia, you can start your marketplace with no coding knowledge. The best part is that they offer a 14-day day free plan with all the major premium services which give a great reason to try Podia right now.

Visit Podia Now

4.8/5

4.8/5

Podia in a Nutshell

Podia is a learning management system (LMS). Basically, an LMS helps you create, host, launch, sell and manage your online courses and digital downloads. In some cases, it also helps you manage webinars and online memberships as well.

There are many LMS’s in the market but not all will help you manage all the things. Fortunately, Podia is different from others.

With Podia, you can do all the things that an ideal LMS does. LMS are mainly three types which are DIY (Do it yourself), SaaS (Software as a service), and Platform-based. And Podia is based on SaaS LMS. 

As a SaaS-based LMS, Podia gives you the advantage of both DIY and Platform-based LMS. That means you don’t need any technical knowledge to create your marketplace and you own your content and pricing as well. You may have to use some external systems and plugins. But don’t worry, we will discuss it later under this review. 

Who is Podia Best For?

Podia is for those people who are looking for an affordable all-in-one course creation and selling platform. People who have any education-related service, content, or course to sell can try Podia. You can generate revenue by selling skills, expertise, and intellectual property from this platform. 

Podia is best suited to:

• Authors
• Teachers
• Coaches 
• Consultants
• Digital Marketer 
• Speaker 

How Does Podia Work?

We’ll start from the basics. 

Once you log into your account, you’ll directly land on the Dashboard. Here you can see a lot of options such as Products, Memberships, Messaging, Email, Affiliates, and so on. We will show you how you can start from scratch.

1. Create a Product

If you are getting started with Podia, selling your products and generating revenue is your first priority. So the first thing you need to do is create a product. You can create your product from the Products section. 

In this section, you get to choose five options for your product.

• Online Course: Here you can create a series of online courses, posts, quizzes, and files. 
• Digital Downloads: Here you can attach downloadable files or e-books. 
• Webinar: With this, you can sell access to your live webinars and seminars. You can give access to Zoom or YouTube to your audience. 
• Coaching Session: Here you can set a custom calendar link for your live one-on-one coaching session. 
• Bundle: This is an all-in-one service section. You can set a bundle of all of your products such as online courses, e-books, webinars, and live sessions at a reasonable price. 

Once you choose a new product, don’t forget to set a proper name before clicking on Create Product. You can add every detail, availability, and pricing of your products before publishing them online. 

2. Create your Website 

Once you have created a product to sell, you must have a platform to sell because you can’t sell a product without a website. On the dashboard, click on your profile and go to Site Settings.

In this section, you’ll see a bunch of pre-sections. You can add your details in this sequence mentioned below. 

• General: Here you can set your store’s name, logo, language, and preferred time zone. You can attach an image for your store logo.
• Email: If you want to send emails through Podia, you have to set your mailing address to comply with the communication laws. When customers sign up for your product, they consent to receive emails from your site. So you can write a custom text that must comply with privacy laws. 
• Payments: In this section, you can set your currency and how you accept payments from your customers. You can add your PayPal or Stripe account where you can collect money. 
• Integrations: Here you can add video and email integrations. Video integrations will let your customers connect with your video accounts for webinar streaming. You can turn on email integrations to tag your customers automatically when they sign up for your product. You can also use Zapier to add third-party apps to automate your workflow. 
• Domain: Here you can set a custom domain for your website or you can use the default Podia URL.
• Analytics: This section is used to track visitors who visited your Podia website. You can use your Google Analytics Tracking ID or Facebook Pixel ID to track visitors. 
• Messaging: You can choose a preferred option to enable messaging. It will help increase engagement with your audience. 
• Team: If you prefer to work as a team, you can invite team members who will help you run your Podia store. Adding teammates will cost $20/month or $240/year for each member. 

Once you complete these steps, you will be able to publish your content/product online. 

3. Start a Community 

You can create a community where you can bring members, products, and discussions at one place. 

You can manage and run the community as you want. You can also set guidelines for the members. 

4. Stay in touch with your audience through Emails

Podia offers you a built-in email marketing platform that helps you keep connected with your audience through emails. Before starting the email marketing from Podia, you must provide your mailing address. It is a mandatory process due to anti-SPAM law. 

You can start sending emails by creating broadcasts or campaigns. You can create broadcasts that are regular emails that are sent to the visitors and customers. And campaigns are a series of emails that are separated by conditions.

You can end a campaign if someone subscribes to other products or things like that. You can also see the audience, subscribers, customers, and members from the Overview section. 

5. Create Coupons

Coupons and discounts are the most prominent way to engage your prospective customers and current audience. Once your product or subscription plans are ready for sale, you can set eye-catching discounts on these. Share the coupon codes with the audience. It will help you boost sales. 

You can set discounts on specific courses, plans, and memberships. Or you can set a big discount on all available products and memberships. Podia allows you to set discounts in percentage and amount. 

5. Know your Audience 

In this section, you can track your audience who are your customers, members, and subscribers. You can check how many customers you have and how many customers have bought your subscription. 

You can also export and import your audience list into a CSV file. You can separately export a group, subscribed, non-subscribed, or your entire audience. 

6. Start an Affiliate program 

Affiliates are an amazing way to incentivize your customers to become advocates for your product and website. You can set a commission in percentage or amount for each sale made through an affiliate.

So whenever an affiliate refers new customers to your website or product, you’ll be able to reward them and you increase sales as well. 

If you have the Shaker or Earthquaker plan, you also have access to the affiliate program as well where you can see how many affiliates you have, how much affiliate commission you’re offering, and so on. You can also see how much revenue, clicks, and conversions made in the past 15 days. 

7. Track your Sales

Now it’s time to see how much sales you have made. Once you set up all the payment options, you will get a direct deposit through PayPal and Stripe. Here you see all the invoices including sales, revenues, refunds, and pending. 

So this is how Podia works. If you follow the steps in a proper way, you’ll start getting sales within no time. 

Podia Features

Ease of Use

The curriculum design and UI play the most important role in any online LMS and Podia has all that. Podia allows you to quickly create courses, make program structures, manage your content, and offer tools to monitor literally everything. 

While designing your website, Podia offers an easy drag & drop feature that allows you to add images, videos, and themes just by dragging them to their particular sections. 

Website Builder

With Podia, you can build a beautiful, modern, search-optimized, and mobile-friendly website for your brand with no coding required. In fact, Podia’s site editor is so easy to use, you can create a stunning site with no design expertise whatsoever.

You can create a homepage to feature your amazing work, sales pages to feature each of your products, a newsletter signup page, and custom pages to build any kind of page you can imagine. 

Podia’s powerful editor gives you a live preview of all changes and makes it easy to customize each page with images, videos, layouts, color selections, and a wide variety of fonts so you can match the look of your site perfectly with your brand.

Your site will automatically be set up with a Podia subdomain, but you can also use a domain you’ve already purchased.

Email Marketing 

Podia offers you an in-built email marketing feature that helps you promote your product and courses to your potential customers. They offer two types of email campaigns: One-off Newsletter and Drip Campaign.

One-off Newsletter broadcasts emails on-demand where Drip Campaign works as an autoresponder. Drip campaign drip-feeds with a sequence of emails to your audience’s inbox. With campaigns, you can analyze the response of your email from your customers like whether they are reading the emails or not.

Messaging

Next, let’s talk about messaging which is a show stopper. Messaging is an amazing tool that helps you engage leads, boost sales and build customer relationships right from your Podia dashboard. It’s a built-in messaging system that lets you chat with your customers in real-time. Visitors can become customers while chatting directly with you on your site. Customers can get live support and answers to their questions. 

You can set up notifications so you’ll know any time a customer is trying to reach you. And if you’re off the clock, set your status to away and have peace of mind knowing chat messages will be saved so you can respond to them later when you return.

Memberships

Creating a membership portal is an amazing way to earn frequent revenue. You can offer regular access to your premium content, courses, and community in your membership portal. To create a membership portal, you must subscribe to Podia’s Shaker and Earthquaker plan. 

You can create both free and paid membership. You can set plans for each membership. If you want to create a paid membership plan, you’ll need to authenticate it on Stripe. You can also offer coupons or free access to one of your courses with the membership. This way you can encourage your audience to go for the premium membership. 

Affiliate Program

With Podia’s Shaker and Earthquaker plans, you have access to Affiliate marketing which makes it easy to set and manage commissions, and allows you to turn your biggest fans into sales reps.

No need for Third-party Hosting 

There are many features that make Podia special and one of the most prominent features is that everything in Podia is unlimited. You can host a number of videos or whatever size of videos you want to host on Podia. 

You can also host an unlimited number of courses. You do not need any third-party hosting providers like Vimeo. Podia provides everything for you. The videos which you host are completely secured so you don’t have to worry about piracy.

Extraordinary Support Staff

Podia has one of the best support out there in any SaaS market. We have used a lot of software and this one offers one of the best support. Podia offers a wealth of free resources, including blog articles, videos, guides, and tools to help you succeed. 

And best of all, as a Podia creator, you have access to world-class seven-days-a-week customer support to answer your questions and help keep your business running smoothly.

Superb Documentation 

Finally, Podia has an extraordinary amount of documentation, and yet again if you do not find anything in the docs you can simply drop a message to their support team and they get back to you quickly and they help you out of their way.

Podia Pricing

Basically, Podia offers three pricing plans. But if you’re ready to try Podia, they also offer a 14-day free trial. Each plan has its own benefits. Let’s see what they are offering with the plans.

1. Mover – $39/month or $390/year

If you are thinking about creating an online course or digital download for the first time, the Mover plan could be the perfect fit. At $39 per month or $390 per year, it’s an affordable option that includes everything you need to host and sell your digital products, so you can focus on growing your audience.

With this plan, you’ll get 

• Unlimited everything 
• Zero transaction fees 
• Free migrations
• Ability to add teammates.
• Email marketing (up to 5,000 recipients per month)

2. Shaker – $79/month or $790/year

For $79 per month or $790 per year, the Shaker plan offers everything in the Mover plan, plus powerful marketing tools and additional products to meet your needs.

With the Shaker plan, you can let your biggest fans market for you with an affiliate management tool that allows you to set custom commissions for all of your products and pays your affiliates

automatically. This plan also lets you embed buy buttons for your digital product on your own website so you have more control over the customer experience.

With this plan, you’ll get 

• Up to 15,000 monthly emails 
• Ability to create a membership community
• Integration with SavvyCal or Calendy (allowing your customers to easily schedule a coaching session with you) 

3. Earthquaker – $179/month or $1790/year

The goal of Podia is to be the only platform a creator needs to go from the first sale to full-scale and that’s why they are thrilled to offer the all-new Earthquaker plan.

For $179 per month or $1,790 per year, Earthquaker includes five team member seats at no additional cost and access to a suite of advanced benefits that are designed to help you save time and increase revenue.

When you sign up for or upgrade to an Earthquaker account, your dedicated account manager will reach out to you to schedule a one-on-one Zoom call.

Services you’ll get with the plan

• A dedicated account manager
• Option to remove branding 
• Ability to send emails to up to 50,000 recipients per month.
• A monthly community meeting with other Earthquaker creators, where experts from Podia share tips, questions, and lessons learned in the later stages of business.

4. Free Trial Plan

Podia also offers a 14-day free trial plan. If you sign up today, you’ll get access to all of their core features, website, email marketing, messaging, affiliates, and embeddable buy buttons.

You can start selling online courses, digital downloads, webinars, and memberships right away for free and with zero transaction fees. And of course, their famous customer support team is waiting and eager to help you get up and running for your 14-day free trial.

Podia Pros & Cons

Pros

• Offers unlimited courses and products
• Simple user interface 
• Create and sell courses, digital products, and memberships in one place 
• Ability to host videos without Vimeo or Wistia
• 0% transaction fee on sales
• Integrated with a built-in email marketing tool that too with drip functionality 
• Allows Zapier integration 
• A 14-day free trial with no credit card required 

Cons

• No in-built funnel builder or landing page builder tools
• Lack of personalized fields in the email marketing 
• Membership and affiliates program comes with only Shaker and Earthquaker plan

Why should You choose Podia?

We tried many LMS platforms before but the reason we liked Podia the most is its ease of use. It’s incredibly simple to get things up running and selling within minutes. Its clean and minimal approach actually helps with engagement for all users. 

If we talk about the pricing, Podia offers monthly plans at $39 and $79, where Kajabi’s basic plan costs you $149 a month. Compared to other platforms the prices are very much affordable.

The sales pages of Podia are more customizable than Teachable and the designs are way better than many LMS. They also have some cool new features. The future of the platform looks way more promising and better than any of those others. 

The features of every LMS are pretty much common such as selling online courses and memberships. But what makes Podia stand out is their free plan. Teachable also has a free plan but the problem is the sales processing fee and transaction fees.

Most of them charge you up to 10% on each sale. But Podia doesn’t charge you any sales charge and the transaction fees which gives you a great reason to switch to Podia.

Podia Review: Conclusion

There are many platforms out there in the market but most of them offer their services at very high prices but Podia is nothing like that. With Podia, you get hands-on basic services with the free plan. And if you want premium services, you can buy them at cheap rates. 

Podia is also an ultimate alternative to Kajabi which is a highly-priced LMS. You’ll get all the features and services except the landing page and funnel builder. So if you just want to sell your course or membership, Podia is a great affordable option. 

We hope this Podia Review suits your purpose well. 

FAQs