Is Podia the Best Platform to Create and Sell Your Online Courses?

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

The demand for education and training services experiences consistent growth because of how accessible information has become.


Right now is the perfect time to become a content creator and sell online courses or digital education products.


There are many venues to set up and market your courses, but today we’ll focus on Podia and see if it’s the right online course platform for you.


Let’s get started!

1. What is Podia?

Podia’s homepage

Podia’s homepage

Podia is a platform designed for content creators that has all the tools they need to sell memberships, webinars, online courses, and digital products.


It’s also great if you want to build a community around your content or you want a platform that’s easy to use and not so expensive.


Podia was originally called Coach when it first launched in 2016 and without many marketing and course creation features, it barely stood out from its competitors.


The Podia team worked hard to update the platform and make it a popular tool for beginners.


They are also known to have great customer support and they offer guides to teach customers how to create a membership site or online course, and how to monetize their content.

2. Podia’s pros and cons

Even though the Podia platform has grown a lot since its beginnings, there is still space for improvements:

Pros

  • It has a beginner-friendly user interface
  • You can sell unlimited courses and products
  • No transaction fees
  • Unlimited video hosting
  • It can integrate with many other tools
  • You can have unlimited students
  • Great customer support

Cons

  • Doesn’t have a free plan
  • Doesn’t offer phone support
  • Has limited customization features
  • Doesn’t come with a sales funnel builder
  • Doesn’t have course completion certificates
  • Doesn’t have a mobile app feature
  • Doesn’t have Cloud uploads

Keep in mind that Podia is still a relatively new online platform and the Podia team is constantly working on ways to improve it.

3. Podia features

Podia’s features

Podia’s features

Despite how young Podia is, it has many useful features and tools for an online business, membership site, or online school.


Keep reading to find out more about how their features could benefit you.

3.1. Create and sell online courses

Podia’s course builder features

Podia’s course builder features

Podia is known for being a great course builder, especially for beginners, because it has a very straightforward interface that anyone can get started with.


Podia uses Wistia to offer unlimited bandwidth for your videos, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space.


With Podia’s course builder, you can easily structure your course's content, engage with your students and track their progress.


The course builder has 2 components:

1. Sections — These represent the structure of your online course

2. Lessons — These are where you can place your course content

Even though Podia’s course builder is easy to use, it’s not very flexible and you might struggle when adding multiple content items to the same lesson.


This means that you can’t add downloadable resources or quizzes directly to your lessons — for that you’ll need to create another section entirely.

3.2. Sell digital downloads

Podia’s digital downloads features

Podia’s digital downloads features

Adding digital downloads to your Podia website doesn’t require any technical knowledge — just select the files from your computer and upload them to Podia.


However, you can only upload files from your computer since Podia doesn’t have a cloud upload feature.


You can sell digital products like:

  • PDFs
  • Ebooks
  • Templates
  • Music
  • Podcasts

This feature makes Podia a great choice for not only content creators, but also artists, photographers, musicians, and writers.


The advantage of selling digital products is that they’ll never run out of stock and your customer can download them instantly after their purchase, eliminating the cost of inventory and delivery.

3.3. Build a community and set up memberships

Podia’s community feature

Podia’s community feature

Podia’s memberships are created with their community feature and they are one of the main methods to monetize your content and community.


With memberships you can:

  • Get recurring revenue — Get paid every month by your subscribers
  • Create engagement — Share content that’s relevant to your community, make announcements, build a thread, etc.
  • For a relationship with your community — Interact directly with your audience and build trust

Podia comes with an integrated membership management system that lets you have unlimited members and levels in a single program.


You can also create gated content and private posts available to specific membership levels.


For your memberships, Podia lets you:

  • Offer a free trial to your customers and charge a monthly or yearly fee
  • Give your community members ways to interact with each other
  • Connect members to exclusive groups on Facebook, Slack, or Palapa

Memberships are also an effective way to sell exclusive content to your subscribers and give them more benefits according to the plan they purchase.

3.4. Make webinars and go live

Podia’s webinar feature

Podia’s webinar feature

Webinars are one of the best methods to sell online products, but you can also use them to collect leads.


That’s why it’s common for digital marketers to either give them away for free or sell them.


To go live in Podia, you can use 2 integrations:

1. YouTube Live — Available in all plans

2. Zoom — Available in the Shaker and Earthquaker plans

Schedule webinars and sell them in advance, make your viewers sign up via Podia to watch them, and turn your attendees into fully engaged subscribers instead of random website visitors.


You can also record the webinar to give access to customers that already paid for it and sell the replay to new customers.

3.5. Easy integration

Podia’s integrations page

Podia’s integrations page

Even though Podia has all the features needed to run your eLearning business, you can still integrate other platforms if you wish.


You can integrate tools for:

1. Email marketing — Launch email marketing campaigns to engage with your email list or promote your courses.


If instead of using Podia’s email marketing features you prefer to use an email service provider, you have these options:

  • GetResponse
  • ActiveCampaign
  • Mailchimp
  • AWeber
  • ConvertKit

2. Payment gateways — Set up a way for your customers to pay on your sales pages.


At the moment, Podia supports:

  • PayPal
  • Stripe

3. Analytics — Track your results and customers’ behavior in your Podia website.


For data collection, you have these choices:

  • Google Analytics
  • HotJar

4. Scheduling — Organize your time or sell coaching sessions.


Embed these tools into your website to reserve a day for strategy sessions with clients:

  • Calendly
  • Acuity Scheduling
  • YouCanBook.me
  • SavvyCal

5. Advertising — Use paid advertising to drive traffic and sales.


Run ads on the following platforms:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Google Ads

3.6. Run affiliate programs

Podia’s affiliate marketing features

Podia’s affiliate marketing features

Create your own affiliate program and give your customers and supporters more reasons to promote your brand.


With Podia’s affiliate tools you can:

  • Easily set up your affiliate program — Create a complete affiliate program without using third-party tools
  • Make your program invite-only or open for everyone — Let anyone become an affiliate or be more selective with who you allow in
  • Decide the terms and conditions for your affiliates — Set the rules you want your affiliates to follow when selling your products
  • Define a commission and pay them instantly — Set up a default commission or different commissions for different products and pay them through PayPal
  • Select what products your affiliates can sell — Allow your affiliates to sell everything or restrict specific products

Affiliate marketing is a great way to promote products and get sales while saving money because you only pay your affiliates when they make a sale.


Your affiliates will do the advertising for you, so you won’t need to run as many ads for people to find your products.


If some of your affiliates are authorities in your niche and they review your product, you can expect to be seen by thousands or even millions of people depending on the number of views.

3.7. Use coupon codes

Podia’s coupon builder

Podia’s coupon builder

With Podia you can create coupons to drive sales or reward loyal customers.


Decide the discount percentage, set the number of uses it will have, pick an expiration date and track the coupon analytics to see how it performed.


There are 5 types of coupons you can create:

1. All products and plans — Make a discount for all available and future products and plans in your store

2. Products only — This coupon works only on the available current and future products on your site, but not on memberships

3. Plans only — This coupon type will apply the discount to all available plans on your site, but not on products

4. Specific plans — Allows you to search, select and discount only specific plans

5. Specific products — Add a discount to specific online courses, digital downloads, webinars, and bundles

This is a really useful feature, but it does have one downside — it can’t be edited once it's finished, so if you made a mistake you’ll have to make a new one.

3.8. Great customer support

Podia’s customer support

Podia’s customer support

Podia’s customer support is one of the renowned features that set it apart from the competition.

They are attentive and available 24/7.


You can contact them through 2 channels — email and live chat.


Before contacting them, you might want to first check the “Help Center” since it’s a complete library made to help you make the best out of your online store.


You can learn how to:

  • Build your own website
  • Optimize your sales pages
  • Do email marketing
  • Set up a marketing strategy
  • Create digital products
  • Issue discounts
  • Build a community

They also run 3 types of free webinars:

1. Weekly Q&A Sessions — You can ask questions directly to the Podia support team and get an answer live

2. Creator Corner — Learn from a current Podia creator during a live interview

3. Onboarding Session — Podia’s customer support experts will guide you to get started

Now that you know what Podia has to offer, it is time to talk about the pricing to see if it’s within your budget.

4. Podia pricing plans

Podia’s pricing plans

Podia’s pricing plans

Podia has 3 pricing plans:

1. Mover — $33/month

2. Shaker — $75/month

3. Earthquaker — $166/month

If you decide to use Podia for your online business, pick the pricing plan that suits your needs.


The Mover plan is great to get started and sell online courses, digital products, and webinars, but it lacks coaching and affiliate marketing features.


You can set up an affiliate marketing program with the Shaker plan and sell unlimited coaching products, so it’s the best plan if you want to do coaching sessions with your clients.


With the Earthquaker plan, you get everything in Mover and Shaker plus an improvement on the already great customer support.


You also get to work side by side with the support team to grow your business.


Each plan has a 14-day free trial and you don’t need to insert your payment details.


You could start with the Mover plan, and as your business grows upgrade to the Shaker plan, and eventually to the Earthquaker plan.


If you'd like to try a cheaper platform with even better features, look no further than systeme.io!

5. Systeme.io: An all-in-one online course platform

systeme.io logo

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is a powerful all-in-one platform that has everything you need to create, launch, market, and sell online courses, memberships, digital products, and webinars.


Our course building features include:

  • An easy drag-and-drop editor to quickly create courses
  • Integration with payments from your sales funnels and websites
  • Creating limited-time access to courses and webinars
  • Allowing you to upload downloadables for your students
  • Managing your students’ progress

You can also run affiliate programs with us:

  • Track and manage your affiliates
  • Set up commissions and payouts instantly
  • Easily integrate your email list and payment system
  • Publish your offers on our marketplace for affiliate marketers to promote

Systeme.io is equipped with all the marketing tools needed to promote an online course.


Our funnel builder can create sales funnels to capture leads while our integrated email marketing tools will launch automatic email marketing campaigns to your contact list.


We have 4 pricing plans:

systeme.io’s pricing plans

systeme.io’s pricing plans

1. Free — $0/month for up to 1 online course

2. Startup — $27/month for up to 5 online courses

3. Webinar — $47/month for up to 20 online courses

4. Unlimited — $97/month for unlimited online courses

If you join us you’ll be able to build your online school, create all the digital products you want, and market them in one single place for less than with Podia.


You also won’t need to integrate any third-party tools because we are an all-in-one platform that has every tool for your business.

6. Conclusion

In this Podia review, we have seen everything Podia can do for a content creator.


Podia lets you create online courses, sell digital products, build memberships, and run webinars while also letting you run and manage your own affiliate program.


Podia is an effective tool, but it’s still missing functionality in some areas.


Alternatively, systeme.io lets you monitor your whole website from a single space and gives you more features for almost half the price.


Create, market, and sell your online courses and digital products from one platform.


Sign up for free and test our features yourself!

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