Communities are a great way to build recurring revenue, create engagement, and build connections with your members.
Podia's community features offer everything you need to create free and paid memberships and connect with your audience - all in one place.
This guide will help you get started with creating and launching your community on Podia.
Creating your community
The first step to create your community on Podia is to access the Community area, where you will give your community a name and activate this feature on your account.
Here's how to create your community on Podia:
From your Podia dashboard, click on Community in the sidebar menu.
After you watch a quick overview video, give your community a name (don’t worry, you’ll be able to change it later) and activate it by clicking on Create community.
Now that your community area is active, it will be automatically populated with a few starter items.
Here’s what you’ll see:Introductory posts that explain how the community works. You can delete these once you’re ready to launch.
“General” and “Random” topics, which help organize content in your community. These are created by default to get you started, and you can rename, edit, or remove them at any time based on your needs.=
Now that you’ve activated your community, let’s move on to creating community plans, which act as the entry point to your community.
Creating a community plan
Customers must be enrolled in a community plan in order to access your community. These plans can be free or paid, and you can create multiple plans depending on how you want to structure your community.
Here's how to create a community plan:
From your Podia dashboard, click on Products in the sidebar menu.
From the Products page, click on "+ New Product".
On the product creation page, select "Community plan" and give it a name.
Click on Create product to create your community plan.
After your plan is created, it's time to customize it. You can navigate between the 3 available tabs to customize different aspects of your community plan:
Details: Give your plan a name, description, image, set up included products and integrations.
Pricing: Set up an offer for your community plan. It can be either free or paid.
Availability: Determine availability options, such as status, visibility and access
Once you've set up all the details for your community plan, hit the Publish button to make it available for new signups.
Now that your community plans are created, it's time to organize your community area with Topics.
Creating Topics
Topics are where posts and updates live inside your community. They help you organize conversations and content in a clear, structured way.
Members can join one or multiple topics, and once inside a topic, they can create posts, comment, and interact with other members.
You can organize topics by tiers, content type, discussion themes, or any structure that makes sense for your community.
Here's how to create new topics in your community:
In the sidebar menu, click on Community and select Topics.
To add a new topic, click on “+ New topic” at the top of the page.
Set up your topic’s details, including its name, description, and image, and choose who can access the topic, create posts, and interact with it.
Now that your topics are set, it's time to start writing and publishing posts!
Writing and publishing posts
Here's how to create a new post in your community:
Click on New post in the community homepage.
Now it’s time to write your post!
Give it a title and write its content. You can easily upload different types of media to your post through our rich-text editor, such as videos, images, audio clips & more!
Make sure to also select the topic your post will be assigned to at the bottom of the post editor.
When you're done, click on “Post” to open publishing options:
Publish: publishes the post immediately
Schedule…: schedule it to be published in the future
Save as a draft: saves your post as draft so it can be edited later
Discard: Discards the post you've made
Once your post is published, it will either go live immediately or follow the schedule you’ve set. It will appear in the topic you selected, and all members with access to that topic will be able to view it.
Launching your community
Once your community plans, topics, and posts are ready, you’re all set to launch your community.
To launch your community, click on Launch Community at the top right of your Home feed.
Once your community is launched, you can use the Share community option to copy and share your community links with potential customers and members.
What's Next?
This is just the beginning of setting up your community on Podia. You can keep exploring more community-related features by checking out the articles below:
Editing your community sales page - Your community sales page is the main page where people can sign up for your community. Learn how to customize how your plans are presented and add more details to help people understand what they’ll get.
Managing community settings - Managing your community settings allows you to edit different aspects of your community, such as name, description, marketing images, availability settings & more.
Managing topic settings - Learn how to manage and edit your topic settings.
Still need help?
If you have any questions, send an email to [email protected] or click the purple help icon to send us a message 😄