Podia is a platform for selling educational content such as courses, memberships, and digital downloads. This is a potentially profitable business model that gives you a chance to earn mostly passive income once you post your content. Podia provides resources to make your material accessible to those who need it. In this review, we’ll be exploring the leading features of Podia and help you decide if it’s a viable option for your business goals. If you’re looking for Podia discounts, see the pricing section of this review for any available promotions.
Podia is a digital storefront from which you can market all types of content, such as:
● Digital Downloads -Including e-books, white papers, and reports.
● Memberships -Set up your own membership site.
● Online Courses – You can sell complete courses or arrange drip delivery (such as a new lesson every week).
● Email Marketing -Sell your newsletter or email course.
I’ve stumbled upon Podia when I purchased the How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies course by Ryan Kulp, hosted on the Podia platform. The entire purchase process, along with the email sequence that followed, was all so simple, smooth, and graphically appealing that I had to review the platform myself.
Podia Helps You Tap Into a Profitable Business Model
Podia is appealing to experienced content creators and beginners looking for a viable way to earn money online. There are many business models, such as e-commerce, consulting, providing services, and others. However, selling content such as digital downloads, courses, and membership sites has several advantages over most other digital business models.
Whether you’re selling a course, e-book, or material from a membership site, you create the content once and sell it multiple times. This is far less labor-intensive than having to manage individual orders or perform a service for each client.
Selling courses and related methods are scalable. As you get more customers, you make more money without having to do much more work. Podia is a platform that’s ideal for scaling as it doesn’t raise prices as you sell more.
Top Features of Podia
There are, of course, many ways to market such materials. You can always sell them directly from your own website. However, Podia offers benefits and features that help you save time and effort while enabling you to present your material in the most appealing way.
● Offer flexible pricing. With Podia, you don’t need to sign up with a separate billing service. You can offer customers a simple buy button and even offer multiple options such as to pay for the whole course or go monthly. For a membership site, you could offer multiple tiers with access to different features. You can also offer coupons.
● Podia integrates with PayPal and Stripe for easy payments. Podia doesn’t charge any transaction fees.
● Podia includes content hosting. You won’t need to host your content on another site such as Shopify, E-Junkie, Gumroad, or others.
● Seamless integration with other applications such as AWeber, Zapier, Drip, and ActiveCampaign.
● Upload a wide variety of file types. You can include text, images, audio, and video files in your content. File types include JPG, MOV, PDF, MOBI, PNG, MP4, EPUB, and more.
● Built-in email marketing. You can send your customers newsletters and drip content. You can even segment your list and send out different content to different customers.
● No limits on file size or the number of products sold. As you sell more, you won’t have to upgrade to a costlier plan.
● Introduce upselling and cross-selling. For example, you can offer a free membership or course and encourage people to upgrade to a paid plan. Or you can cross-sell, which means directing customers to another product.
● Live Webinars. Host live webinars and then either sell or give away the recordings, as you would do with your regular content.
● Recruit affiliates. If you purchase the Shaker or the earthquaker plan, you can integrate affiliate marketing into your platform. Affiliates can help you sell your courses and other content in exchange for a commission.
● Free tools. Several handy tools are included for free. These are a sales page generator, a lead magnet generator, an email campaign generator, a privacy policy, and TOS generators. Normally, these would cost you a substantial amount; however, Podia makes them free for its users.
You can get a better idea of how these and other features work on Podia by looking at some of the case studies they present on their website. You can see actual courses, membership sites, and other content that’s available on the platform.
A Simpler Way to Sell Digital Content
Running an online business requires you to manage many moving parts. You either have to do all the work yourself or pay others to do it. If you’re selling a course from your website, for example, you need to find the right domain, host, billing system, a platform to host your content, and an email marketing service.
With Podia, you won’t need to use separate services and platforms for all these functions. You’ll be able to manage your business from a single dashboard. This helps you save both time and money as you won’t need to pay for so many separate services. It also lets you manage your business more efficiently without the need to sign in and out of multiple platforms frequently.
The simplicity of operating from one platform can help you grow your business faster. As noted, one of the advantages of selling content is that you can scale up. Once you start selling one course on Podia, you can create more. The same is true for any other type of content you’re marketing. You can send out multiple email newsletters, membership site material, or anything else.
Support and Training
Podia offers extensive resources to help you succeed with your business. It isn’t merely a platform from where you sell your content. The team at Podia recognizes that many sellers need training and guidance to help them succeed online. There are ample resources for people who have never sold anything online before.
There’s a complete guide on creating an online course. There are also numerous articles on memberships, digital downloads, entrepreneurship, idea generation, marketing, and more. You can access many of these resources for free, even if you’re not a Podia member.
Podia supplies a sales copy generator to help you promote your products and a digital download generator to create a professional-looking PDF that you can sell or give away as a lead generator.
These and other resources help you create effective products and sales funnels, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced marketer.
● Mover: $39/month or $396/year via this trial signup. You get unlimited usage for selling online courses, memberships, digital downloads, and other content with no transaction fees and 24/7 support.
● Shaker: $89/month or $900/year via this trial signup. All the benefits of Mover plus embedded checkout, 15K monthly email recipients, third-party code (to embed on sites such as Facebook), and affiliate marketing (recruit affiliates to sell your content).
● Earthquaker: $199/month or $1990/year via this trial signup. All the benefits of Mover and Shaker plus a dedicated account manager, white-labeled website, and 50K monthly email recipients.
If you pay annually for either plan, you get 2 months free, as well as free content and customer migration from any alternative platform you might have been using.
A 14-day free trial is included with all plans.
Podia Lifetime Discount – Many readers turn to me asking whether there’s a lifetime Podia discount available. Well, once a year, around Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Podia is running its annual promotional sale. Last year, new users were getting 15% off any plan. Existing users also got 15% off to upgrade their plans or move from monthly to annual billing. The latest sale details can be found on this page. This Podia discount is for the lifetime of the account. Podia is quite unique in this, as companies normally only provide discounts for new customers. All this means is that if you need Podia right now and you get a free trial or go on a paid plan, you won’t be missing out on their upcoming deals.
All in all, compared to many services and platforms, Podia’s pricing is quite simple and transparent. The main reason for this is that they don’t charge extra based on usage or sales. All plans provide support for unlimited transactions.
Podia is one of the most flexible and feature-rich options for selling courses and other online content. It’s set up to be equally valuable for new and experienced entrepreneurs. It provides a simple way for people from all backgrounds to earn a living from their interests or areas of expertise.
One of the best things about Podia is that it doesn’t require technical know-how, coding, or installing any plugins. While some people are comfortable doing their own coding, Podia opens up opportunities for less tech-savvy with valuable knowledge to share.
Podia is a powerful tool if you fit either of these categories:
● You want to start selling digital content, such as a membership site, downloads, or courses and want a simple, all-in-one solution.
● You’re already selling digital content but are looking for a more user-friendly platform to do so.
And if you’re still not entirely convinced that Podia is the right solution for you, check out their free weekly demo, or for an alternative platform, see our Teachable discounts.