Podia is a platform founded with the goal of enabling content creators to make a living from sharing their passion with the world.
While it started off as purely an online course platform, it has evolved to also provide the tools creators need to share their ideas with the world.
I first came across Podia while I was in the post-production stage of creating my first online course. It was the first course I had ever produced, and I felt overwhelmed when presented with all of the different options for publishing my course.
Let’s see, my options included…
- Self-hosted Wordpress with a Learning Management System (LMS) plugin — solid nope there, since I’m not a Wordpress fan.
- Teachable
- Teachery
- Ruzuku
- Thinkific
- …and about a billion other options that were making my brain explode as I tried to evaluate all of them.
Thankfully, I found a really awesome resource from Janelle Allen that had a comparison chart of the different softwares available. After reading up on the top picks, I was curious about one software that I hadn’t stumbled across yet: Podia. So I decided that I should check them out.
My first impression of the software was overwhelmingly positive.
Podia’s website has one of the prettiest and cleanest designs I’ve ever seen, and the software itself continued that trend. Everything was just so…easy. Since I’d already put together all of the videos and written content for the course, I had the entire thing assembled in Podia within a couple hours.
In addition to providing a fantastic LMS, Podia makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages, and send out email marketing campaigns to your customers. This is the sort of functionality I would expect to see only by connecting several apps together (such as LeadPages + ActiveCampaign), but Podia is capable of handling the marketing needs of content creators too.
The way Podia approaches inbound marketing lines up really well with how I feel that inbound marketing can be legitimately helpful — it’s a chance to educate, and provide something of real value to your prospective client. Education is the ideal way to establish a relationship; by sharing some of our knowledge, for free, with our website visitors, we can begin to set ourselves up as both an expert in our field and a trusted advisor.
I had a chance to chat with Spencer Fry, the Founder of Podia, to pick his brain a little on how to best use the software. Based on his input, I ended up creating a learning center using Podia that houses any courses I create, but also the top lead magnets that I use to generate clients. In particular, people go nuts over The 7 Fatal Proposal Mistakes Costing You Sales — probably because everyone needs a little help with their proposals.
When I say people go nuts, I mean that I'm getting a new lead from that lead magnet alone every day. Sometimes more than that.
Educating your visitors is great, but you need to be able to communicate with them afterwards. Thankfully Podia handles that super well too — once visitors download a lead magnet from my learning center, I send out a drip email sequence to their email address. After a few emails, I often get a call or email requesting a consultation.
Design, functionality, and a fantastic user experience are among the many reasons that I would recommend Podia. The reason I chose it over every other teaching platform is that it also provides everything my business needed to ramp up our inbound marketing and share our knowledge with the world.
As a quick recap, Podia lets you:
- Create a learning center and online courses for your visitors
- Create landing pages and deliver your lead magnets
- Create and send email marketing campaigns (drip campaigns too!)
Curious to try Podia for yourself? Click here to start a free trial.
