Podia Review – Top Online Course Platform

Before you dive into a completely new online course platform, it’s always best to read through a review. If that’s what you’re here for, then you’ve come to the right place.

Setting up and marketing online courses haven’t always been a walk in the park for many creators. Luckily, many new platforms have emerged to help them all out.

One of them is Podia. All of its amazing features have helped it stand out from the rest of its rivals. That’s why we highly recommend that you check out this platform.

What is Podia?

Podia is an effective online course platform because of its ease of use and standout features. You can easily create a fully-working website and digital storefront with this platform.

Online courses can be embellished with supplemental resources and quizzes. You can even upload videos and conduct webinars right on the platform.

Your sales page can also be customized to entice more users to enroll in your course and purchase your other digital products. Digital products like a membership site and digital downloads can be created on Podia.

Email marketing tools also help course creators advertise their products. They can reach new users and send them enticing offers based on what step of the sales funnel they’re on.

Affiliate marketing can also be done on Podia. Creators can partner up with affiliates and give them commission rates for better conversion rates of their products.

Podia has two paid plans and a free trial upon signing up. All users have to do is provide their name, email address, and answer some questions.

There are absolutely no transaction fees when subscribing to Podia.

Features and Benefits of Podia

We’ve highlighted on this Podia review the best features that you can get when you’re subscribed to a Podia plan. Keep reading below.

Course Creation

Podia offers competent course creation tools for registered users. Online courses are one of the three digital products that Podia allows its users to sell on the platform.

There’s no limit as to how many courses you get to create on Podia. In fact, you can also upload an unlimited amount of supplemental materials to go with your courses. It’s basically unlimited everything.

You can create a course with different sections and lessons pretty easily. Podia’s course builder is a drag-and-drop. It lets you arrange and organize how the sections will look on your main page.

Podia also gives each account unlimited bandwidth. You can upload as many video files to your account without having to use software like Wistia or Vimeo.

As for assessment features, the platform has all the essential tools for creating a quiz. You can add multiple questions into your quizzes and then have students take them at the end of a lecture.

You can add images to accompany your quiz questions, as well as upload other file types. This will help guide your students while answering their assessments.

Drip Content

In relation to online courses, you can set your content to drip with Podia. This means that you can control how much new content will be released to your students.

With a drip content feature, your learners won’t have to feel too overwhelmed when taking their lessons. You can set new modules to be sent out to them only once they accomplish a specific module.

Digital Downloads

Another product that you can create on Podia is digital downloads. They’re similar to the online courses except for the fact that you can pre-design them offline.

All you have to do is prepare them and then upload them to the platform. And even after uploading, you can add additional text, images, and other content to supplement it.

Plus, like the online courses, you can create an unlimited number of digital downloads.

An example of a digital download is an article, a video tutorial, or even an eBook.

Email Marketing

Podia has email marketing tools that can help you reach a wide audience for your products. You can send out bulk emails to entice users to subscribe to buy your online courses and digital downloads.

Each course creator can make an email list that has all the email addresses they’ll be sending promotional materials to. You can send out the emails to your enrolled students, as well as to unsubscribed users.

Weekly newsletters and course updates are commonly sent out via Podia’s email marketing tools. This helps keep the students up-to-date with what’s going on in their course.

Email funnels and drip campaigns can also be done through the platform. Creators can find out what part of the sales conversion process or sales funnel a user is and then send an email based on that.

For example, if a user hasn’t completed their sign-up sheet, you can send out an email reminding them to finish the registration process. Or if a student hasn’t renewed his subscription, then you can send a reminder to re-subscribe.

Lastly, you can also track the analytics of the emails you create and send out. Podia offers access to conversion rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates based on the emails.

That way, you can find out what kind of email and content works best to entice potential users. It’s a great help to your marketing campaign and will eventually increase overall revenue.

Affiliate Marketing

Another marketing feature that you can use on Podia is affiliate marketing. Course creators can run an affiliate program on the platform.

Through affiliate marketing, you can reach more audiences to promote your products. You’ll get to partner up with affiliates who’ll advertise your digital products on their social media sites and blogs.

For this feature, you’ll have to set a fixed commission rate for your chosen affiliates. Each product that you sell can have different commission rates as well.

How this works is you invite your preferred affiliates to sign up with Podia. They’ll be able to promote your products once they’re registered.

Once users start subscribing to your courses and buying your products through your affiliates, you can track conversion rates. You’ll have access to click rates and overall sales that are generated by the affiliates.

In turn, your affiliates will also have access to their own dashboard on Podia. The platform has a section where they can access everything they need for affiliate marketing.

They’ll get to see all the affiliate links to be used, their overall sales, and total commission rates earned.

If you find that a particular affiliate isn’t quite working out or isn’t as effective as they should be, then you also have to option to cease the partnership.

On your website, you can add affiliates to the digital storefront, and then Podia can generate new affiliate links for products that they personally want to market.

Customization Options

As mentioned, Podia has a drag-and-drop page builder. It’s fairly easy-to-use since it simplifies the process of setting up the digital storefront to your website.

Before you even start selling courses, you must make sure that your website looks visually appealing. With Podia, you can change your website’s color scheme to match your branding.

That way, you can set specific shades for your buttons, text, and backgrounds. And you can even choose a specific font type and size for all the text on the website.

Since your website serves as a digital storefront for your courses, then it should be designed with the user in mind. You can use pre-made elements that come with Podia’s page builder to organize your website.

In just a few clicks, you can add a page banner, author bio, and course description to every sales page you have. You can even separate them into smaller sections for better organization.

Other elements that you can add to your website are FAQs, reviews, and contact details. You can also add descriptions to your other products apart from online courses like digital downloads and memberships.

Memberships

Speaking of memberships, they’re the third product that you can start selling on Podia. This means that you can set up a website that can only be accessed by people with memberships or subscriptions.

You can upload a variety of premium content and products onto your website. Users who enroll and avail of a subscription will be the only ones to read through them.

And you can set a fixed pricing scheme for the memberships that you sell on Podia. Course creators can set the memberships to either be completely free, to offer a free trial, or to have a monthly fee.

Checkout Process

Once your users have selected the products that they want to purchase, they’ll be lead to your checkout page. Podia’s checkout process is effective because it doesn’t require users to register before giving payment.

The sign-up process also doesn’t take too long because Podia won’t ask for too many details from the users. All they have to do is fill in the required details on a pop-up that appears on the platform and then submit.

Course creators can also personalize their checkout pages for a better checkout process. A special checkout button can be embedded on your website to make it more eye-catching.

Onsite Messaging

One of the most popular features that Podia has is its own messaging system. You can communicate with other users right on the platform!

Podia has a live chat feature that lets course creators communicate with their students and subscribers. Potential users can ask creators questions about digital products before they purchase.

The messaging feature also helps creators gather customer feedback that they can use to improve their products.

Users can also send in any questions that they have regarding a lesson or module to the course creator via the messaging feature. It greatly helps with the overall learning process and avoids misunderstandings.

Course creators can also opt to message their current users about new courses or products that they have. This is good if the new product being offered is related to the product that the user currently has.

And not just that. Creators can even ask for suggestions from the users before they decide to come up with a new online course or product. They can message the users whether or not an idea is worth pursuing or not.

With Podia, there’s no more need to sign up for an outside messaging up just to communicate with your online community. You can do it right on the platform.

Customer Support

A good customer support team is one of the pillars of having a competent online course platform. Podia has exactly that.

When using Podia, you’ll have access to 24/7 live chat support with the Podia team. Whether you’re having issues with the platform or just have questions about how to create an online course, you can expect an instant response.

If live chatting isn’t your thing, then you can also send an email to the Podia team instead. Many users have said that they receive a reply in as fast as 5 minutes when they take this route.

Podia also has a compiled database of articles right on their website. The topics range from FAQs to design guides and even copywriting tips.

Course creators can even watch exclusive video trainings and tutorials right on the Podia site. They’re great guides for those who are just starting out with using the online course platform.

One thing you should note about Podia’s customer support though is that they don’t have a live call feature. But nonetheless, their chat and email responses are efficient.

How Podia Works

Using Podia to sell online courses and create digital products is simple as it can be. Just follow these steps:

Step 1: Sign Up

To do this, simply enter the Podia website. You’ll have to enter your name, email address, and answer some optional questions.

You’ll know that the registration was successful when you get sent to your dashboard after.

Step 2: Create a Product

You can now create your first product. For this step, you can choose from an online course, digital downloads, or a membership site.

Name your digital products and then add a description as well to set it up.

Step 3: Upload Content

Once you’ve named your digital products, you can begin enriching them with supplemental content. You can add specific sections to an online course and then upload an image or video file to go with it.

You can also add assessments and quizzes to the end of every online course.

As for digital downloads, simply upload the type of content that your users can opt to purchase. For a membership site, you can create it through the Podia platform and then toggle the settings as well.

You can also set a fixed price for your digital products.

Step 4: Customize Your Sales Page

Once you’ve finalized the digital products that you want to market, you can customize your sales page.

You’ll want to set a specific color scheme, as well as font type and style for your site. This will help sell online courses better because everything will look more aesthetically pleasing.

Once you’ve done all that, you’re all set!

What Needs Improvement on Podia

But despite Podia’s ease of use and great features, we’ve realized through this Podia review that there are still a few issues on the site.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, though Podia has 24/7 live chat and email support, it doesn’t have phone support. It could be difficult to solve more complicated issues since you can’t talk to someone personally.

Lack of phone support also makes it hard for users whose issues are related to connectivity problems. It’ll be difficult to solve their problems if there are no offline ways to communicate with the Podia team.

Though Podia does offer a free trial for first-time users, it doesn’t have a free standalone plan. This is an issue for those with tighter budgets.

And in relation to pricing plans, Podia also only has two instead of three, which most online course platforms have.

Finally, even though Podia has all the essential features you need for setting up your digital business, it still lacks some more advanced tools.

For example, when creating a course, you can only upload one resource for each section. Multiple files can’t be added to particular sections.

That can cause a problem for more complex topics that could need more supplemental materials. Plus, if you’ve already added a file to your course, then you can no longer add a quiz to it. You have to decide on only one element for each section.

Any videos that you upload to our online courses aren’t downloadable either. This is since Podia has separated that feature for its digital downloads product.

As for the overall design of your membership site or sales page, there is only one standard built-in theme to choose from. You can’t customize it to completely match your branding.

Podia Pricing

One thing you should know about Podia is that it has absolutely no transaction fees. Whether you avail of the Mover Plan or the Shaker Plan, you won’t ever have to worry about extra transaction fees.

And upon registration, you’re entitled to a 14-day free trial. With it, you can access all of Podia’s essential features for free.

Podia Mover Plan

The Podia Mover Plan costs $39 per month. When paid annually, it only costs $390 per year so that’s $32.50 per month instead.

With this Podia pricing plan, you get to create your own website to serve as a home for all your digital products. You can only create two types of products with this plan — either an online course or a digital download.

You can also host your own webinars to broadcast to your enrolled users with this plan. Email marketing tools and messaging can be done on the platform as well.

As mentioned, you can upload as much content as you want since you get unlimited bandwidth. Plus, there’s round-the-clock customer support.

This plan also lets you do email marketing with its built-in email marketing tools.

For a more detailed review of the plans, check out our article on Podia’s Pricing Plans and Subscriptions.

Podia Shaker Plan

The Podia Shaker Plan costs $79 per month. When paid annually, it only costs $790 per year so that’s $65.84 per month instead.

You get all the same features that the Mover Plan offers, as well as added benefits. You can sell memberships in addition to an online course and digital download.

There’s also an option to integrate your Zoom account, create a blog, and embed “Buy” buttons on your site. You can run an affiliate program with this plan too.

Finally, course creators can install third-party code codes from apps like Facebook, Pixel, and Olark with this Podia pricing plan.

Podia Review/s

To help you decide whether or not Podia is the right fit for your needs, you’ll probably want to hear an authentic Podia review. That’s why we’ve laid out these testimonials from actual users below:

“Switching to Podia allowed us the ability to concentrate on the quality of our course content and less on the labor of launching new courses.”

-Anonymous

“By far the sleekest design UX experience I have had with any e-learning platform, and I have used others in the past.”

-Anonymous

“It has helped me build my business with so much ease. I love how simple it is to build a course. ”

-Anonymous

“The people at Podia are extremely helpful even for a detailed person such as myself, they respond to questions quickly and provide video on how-to tutorials.”

-Anonymous

“Creating a wealth-building program, I could not see spending double or triple the amount of Podia on another platform when I teach others how to build their wealth by being frugal.”

-Anonymous

Alternatives to Podia

If this Podia review still hasn’t convinced you of Podia’s wonderful benefits, then we suggest that you try out these Podia alternatives instead.

Teachable

Teachable is a popular alternative for just about any online course platform. This is since it has all the essential features you’d need to get set up.

The course creation features help you create a course and enrich it with valuable resources. You can also add quizzes and assessments to the end of your lessons.

Course creators on Teachable can even reward their students with certificates and badges of accomplishment. This is one thing that sets it apart from Podia.

It also offers analytics and reporting options to all its subscribers. You can easily access compiled reports through the Teachable dashboard.

You can even use the sales funnel builder that Teachable has right on the platform. No need to install a third-party application.

But unlike Podia, Teachable doesn’t let you create a membership site and market it as a product. It only allows you to create courses.

Teachable is also known to ask for high transaction fees, unlike Podia which doesn’t charge extra fees.

In terms of email marketing, you’ll also have to integrate a third-party application when using Teachable. The email marketing tools are still quite limited.

One similarity it does have with Podia is that the support team offers a live chat feature.

Learndash

The thing about Learndash is that it isn’t a standalone platform like Podia is. It’s a WordPress plug-in that only works if you, obviously, have a WordPress site.

But despite that difference, Learndash still has everything it takes to set up a digital business. It’s specifically geared for those who want to go into the e-learning industry.

Like Podia, it has an effective course and page builder for setting up your site. You can create your courses and then add supplemental content to each section.

Quizzes can also be added to every lesson that a student finishes. But unlike Podia, Learndash allows you to customize the quizzes with advanced assessment features.

Students can not only answer different quiz types, but they can also upload files as their submissions to the quizzes. There’s also an automatic grading and checking feature on Learndash.

Like Teachable, instructors can also send out certificates of accomplishmenb to their students. There’s also an interactive forum on the platform wherein all users can form a community.

But unlike Podia, Learndash has limited email marketing options. You have to install third-party apps to maximize the email marketing features.

Also, you can’t create and sell memberships on Learndash. You can only create courses and set up modules. That’s about it.

Final Verdict

Whichever way you put it, Podia is a great and effective platform for those who want to start a digital business. You can create not just one but three types of digital products.

The only downsides of this platform would be that there’s no phone support, free plan, and that the course features still are pretty limited.

But otherwise, the course creation tools and page builder have everything you need to make a fully-working site. You can even do some basic customization with them.

As for marketing the products you make, Podia offers great email and affiliate marketing options. That way, you can increase revenue by influencing more users to purchase your products.

There’s also a messaging feature right on the Podia site so you can easily communicate with all of your students. The 24/7 live chat and email responses from the support team are helpful as well.

And perhaps one of the nicest things about Podia is that it asks for no transaction fees. You pay only for what you’re asked for.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this Podia review, we hope that we’ve persuaded you to try out this competent course platform.

We suggest you give it a shot, especially since Podia offers a free 14-day trial anyway. You’ll surely have no regrets.