How Kevin Turner went from radio broadcaster to podcaster

Persistence and hard work has paid off for radio broadcaster Kevin Turner as he turns podcasting into business success.

Many years ago, Turner combined his love of radio with his passion for real estate, by approaching Brisbane’s 4BC with an idea of hosting a real estate show. 

You can still hear Turner each weekend on 4BC, but these days he focuses much of his time on his own real estate podcasts: Real Estate Talk for investors and home buyers; and Real Estate Uncut for real estate agents.

“I studied what podcasting was all about and then decided, well if I’m going to get serious about this thing, then I’d better start producing my own show as distinct from a 4BC show, which was all about talkback,” Turner explains.”So, I took it into podcasting.”

Real Estate Uncut, he says, “comes out every day, it runs for about 7 minutes. We have a really good listener base. In fact it’s the most listened-to real estate podcast designed for agents in Australia,” with 60,000-plus listeners.

Success didn’t happen overnight. “It’s taken a long, long time. I remember in the early days we reached I think about three or four hundred people as subscribers, and I thought ‘wow!’ this is just such hard work.”

“We just had to keep marketing and keep pushing and keep making contact,” he continues. “We’ve become a lot smarter about asking our guests now to make sure they push the podcasts out and that’s helped us grow enormously.”

Finding sponsors for the podcasts was tough in those early days, too, Turner insists. “I couldn’t compete with the main stream media. So, effectively I had to find partners who would have the same kind of passion about communicating with the audiences I did and I said to them, ‘Look, I will give you a competitive rate and I will hold that rate for the life time of your existence with me.’”

“While the advertising can be very powerful, both on the site and in the podcasts, I find advertorials work the very very best and we talk to our sponsors about giving some value back to the listener, but at the same time giving credit to their business. So, what I try to do with our advertisers is not just treat them as advertisers. I try to make them almost advocates or experts in the industry that we’re trying to reach or talk about.”

Successful podcasting is understanding the audience, he says. “We spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to understand who our listeners are, how they’re listening to us, how they’re consuming, how long they’re listening for, what turns them on and we’ve got some really good stats on all of that use to keep our podcasts moving forward.”

And he sees podcasting as the way of the future: “It’s just staggering now how many people are on mobile. That mobile audience is growing astronomically.”

Kevin Turner’s interview is from Episode 10 of the highly-regarded podcast series on Australia’s podcasting industry, BE Podcasting – Engage Your Audience.