Our research team spent a significant amount of time investigating the Podia platform as a showcase for online courses. The entire team agrees unanimously on Podia’s brilliant simplicity and its ease in course management.
The course player is very user-friendly, and the built-in live chat tool is an excellent feature for building community and supporting your students.
Podia gives you the ability to create landing pages to sell your courses, and it can handle all of your course marketing with its email marketing tools.
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Podia Digital Courses
Podia has two main strengths when it comes to creating and selling online courses. The first is that it is very straightforward to use. The second is that there are no limits on content, earnings, students, or emails.
Single Course
As an all-in-one platform, Podia has everything you need to create and market an online course, simplifying the whole process.
To build the course, you just click, type, drag, and drop. You can add page sections once you have created your page and then add files, links, quizzes, and videos to the pop-up window.
There is no student progress overview, but you can still follow a student’s progress by clicking on their profile and then the Progress tab.
Bundle of Courses
Using Podia, you can offer multiple courses to your customers at discounted rates.
Offering similar courses together is excellent for promoting your business as well as tempting students to buy more.
You can set up course bundles and a landing page to quickly sell them on the Podia platform.
Pre-Launch Courses
Pre-launching is a fantastic marketing strategy. It attracts the attention of potential students and gets them talking about your course.
Pre-launching a snippet of a course to an email list can help you confirm that the course idea is a good one before you launch the entire thing. You can see how many people sign up if it’s a good idea to continue creating it.
Podia offers all the tools necessary to pre-launch courses and the ability to collect emails before your launch.
Pre-Sell Courses
Podia offers the chance to pre-sell courses if you have lots of enthusiasm from current students about the next course you will be launching.
Pre-selling can help confirm a new concept as well as making some money before the launch. You can pre-sell as many courses as you want to before the launch without any time or usage limits.
Drip Courses
Podia’s Drip Courses feature lets your students access segments sequentially or chronologically, gradually unlocking the complete course.
A Drip Course guides users through instead of overwhelming them with all of the material at once. With this feature, you can upload the content and then set a delivery schedule.
You can also manually unlock any locked sections for an individual student at any time by going to their customer profile.
Podia Course Creation & Student Engagement Interface
In this article, we will guide you through Podia’s course creation and the course player.
Podia is an excellent choice for users to create as many courses as they wish. You don’t need any technical experience, as it’s straightforward to build and manage your courses.
Podia also has an intuitive student engagement interface, enabling distraction-free learning.
Course Content Upload
Our team of experts agrees that uploading content to your course is very intuitive. Podia’s user interface is among the easiest to navigate, and you can easily upload files, links, or text.
However, there are several downsides. You cannot import files directly from the Cloud, so, for example, you can’t import from Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive.
There are also some issues with downloading certain types of content. You can’t make videos downloadable, and you can’t turn off the download function for audio files.
However, with Podia’s easy-to-use course creation tool, you can build great-looking courses.
When creating a course, there are two levels to organize the course structure – sections and lessons.
Sections act as organizers for your content, and lessons contain the actual content you upload – audio, video, text, etc. You can add all content by dragging and dropping.
Essentially, every file you upload becomes a lesson. You can reorganize all of the courses by dragging them across the sections.
Course Player
The Course Player is the area where your students view your course content, so its design is crucial to their learning experience.
Podia offers a pleasing and professional design, which is easy for users to navigate. Students can navigate the sessions by going back and forth through lessons.
Your students can watch the content in the main area and use the Table of Contents on the screen’s left side to navigate the course. You can also easily hide the Table of Contents for a distraction-free learning experience.
Students can leave questions and remarks under each lesson in the opened comment section without leaving the course player.
There are a couple of downsides – one is that the course player’s design doesn’t allow for customization, and there’s just one default template. However, it has a very modern style, which intentionally makes the course material a top priority without any distractions.
Learning Tools
Podia provides a quiz tool you can set up in any lesson, and you can add as many questions as you like. If these have more than one answer, you can add these and checkmark the correct one.
There are a couple of drawbacks – you cannot grade quizzes automatically or set a passing grade, and you can’t add images to the questions.
Podia does not offer course completion certificates and assignment administration. However, there is a workaround to create course certificates through Podia. Users will need a Google account to use Google Forms, Google Slides, and a Zapier account. Zapier, which integrates with Podia, is an automation tool that allows you to connect Podia with hundreds of apps instantly. Through Podia, Zapier is available free with up to 100 tasks per month, and Podia shows you how to create certificates in a step-by-step guide.
Content locking is not available either. This absence means you can’t stop students from going to the next lesson if they haven’t completed a previous one.
You can drip feed courses, setting a delivery date for the gradual release of each section. One advantage of this tool is that it keeps students engaged.
On the other hand, some students may complete sections quickly and be impatient to continue. With Podia, you can manually unlock segments of your drip course for your more ambitious students.
Podia Marketing Tools for Courses
Affiliate Marketing for Courses
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing in which businesses reward people who bring new customers to them. In practical terms, this usually takes the form of a unique web link.
Podia Affiliates receive a percentage of the sign-up fee for each customer referral. Podia users need to set up the Affiliate Program to take advantage of this.
There are many affiliate marketing networks out there to connect affiliates and course owners. You can also set up and manage your affiliate program using tools like AffiliateWP or Rewardful.
However, there is an even simpler option of managing an affiliate program directly on your Podia dashboard. This feature is available with the Shaker pricing plan only.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is an essential tool for communicating with your customers.
Podia stores subscribers on the dashboard, sorting, segmenting, and exporting them.
You can send email updates to all subscribers or target updates to specific groups. Automated emails can trigger after events, such as form-filling. You can also automatically send drip campaigns, and you can track and analyze clicks and conversion rates.
Podia’s email capture tool can also help you grow your email list. If you need to use your existing email service provider, Podia offers integrations with Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip, and other providers. You can import up to 2,000 email subscribers from an existing platform for free.
The only downside: the email template offers only basic text formatting.
Free Lead Management
Lead Management helps businesses track and optimize sales efficiently. You can manage and nurture leads all from the same place. The advantages of Lead Management are that it prevents lost leads and filters out unqualified leads. As your business grows and your lead figures escalate, it could get more complicated. In this scenario, following up with leads is even more critical to avoid losing potential customers. All the data received could be overwhelming, so it’s essential to stay on top of it and generate a high ROI.
Podia helps users acquire and manage leads. Students become leads when they arrive at your online course with the email capture tool. Customer leads then become subscribers on your email list.
The Podia system houses all your leads, and the Podia team has a wealth of advice on creating lead magnets.
Lead Management helps businesses to see which of their tactics bring in new leads. You can see a full history of a lead’s interaction, and automation helps avoid losing leads. However, both sales and marketing teams need to be constant across the information and be proficient in using the tool. They need to work together to be successful, and your employees still need to keep active by following up with your customers.
Pre-Launch & Pre-Sell Courses
You can create excitement for your course with a pre-launch to get pre-orders and get your students’ early reactions to a new course.
First, you need to let your prospective students know about the course and what skills they will be learning. So, before your pre-launch, you will need to grow your email list. Then you need a pre-launch landing page for your subscribers to become students on your course.
The Podia Editor allows you to create high-converting and visually appealing landing pages. You can insert a sign-up form on the landing page, where you can also collect email addresses.
Podia gives lots of useful advice and examples of pre-launching and pre-selling courses.
Podia Courses FAQ
How to Sell Courses with Podia?
To sell courses with Podia, you can simply set up the pricing and offer payment plans to your customers when you’re building your website. You can add Stripe or PayPal to collect payments for your course, and you can add an upsell and create discount coupons.
Then you can continue designing your site, adding your bio, testimonials, and FAQs.
After that, you can create a sales page to attract customers to your course.
Does Podia Allow Affiliate for My Courses?
Yes, Podia does allow affiliate marketing for your courses, so long as you are on the Shaker pricing plan. When your affiliates refer customers, Podia handles the calculations, and you simply click on a button to pay your affiliates.
How to Set Up an Online Course With Podia?
Once you have set up an account, go to settings to fill in details such as your site’s name. Then go to the Products section to start creating your course.
What is the Difference Between Podia Digital Download and a Course?
A Podia digital download is a file or collection of files such as a PDF, an ebook, a workbook, a guide, or a template. You can also sell individual lessons that aren’t part of a course as digital downloads.
A Podia online course is a series of lessons over days or weeks with students achieving a specific result at the end of it.
Does Podia Offer Quizzes for Their Courses?
Yes, Podia offers interactive quizzes for their courses. You can test your students’ knowledge with one or more questions at the end of each module. Your students can see their results before they move on to the next lesson, and you can see the results by checking their course progress.
Does Podia Offer Integrations for Their Courses?
Podia offers many integrations for their courses.
These include email service providers like Mailchimp, Drip, and ActiveCampaign.
Other integrations available are analytic tools like Google Analytics, advertising integrations, including Google Ads, Facebook, and Zapier, connecting Podia with more than 1,000 different apps.
Podia also works with any app installed with a code snippet such as Olark, the live chat software.
Does Podia Course Builder Allow for Cloud Imports?
No, the Podia Course Builder does not allow for Cloud imports, which means you can’t import files from cloud providers like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox.
Bottom Line
Podia is a phenomenal platform for creating online courses, especially for beginners. It is simple in its design, affordable, and easy to use, offering everything you need to market and deliver your online courses and lessons.
As well as providing plenty of learning tools and a clean-cut student learning environment, it houses all your leads and handles your affiliate marketing.
Downloadable products and webinars are other features that may also benefit your business.
The positives, such as free migrations and no transaction fees, far outweigh the downsides we mentioned. Podia is a value-for-money course building platform that takes care of course creation’s technical side, freeing its users to focus on educating their students.
Frequently Asked Questions:
- How to Access Podia Customer Support?
- How Many Podia Integrations Can You Connect?
- Is There a Podia Demo?
- Where Can I Find a Detailed Podia Review?
- Are There Any Podia Black Friday Deals?
- Is There a Podia Lifetime Deal?
- How Much Does Podia Cost?
- What Features Does Podia Have?
- Where Can I Find Podia Website Examples?
