An estimated 89 million Americans listened to online radio last month, and 56% have listened to an online AM/FM station, or pureplay internet radio station. That is a number that should continue to grow for the next several years.

One of the major keys to leveraging your online streaming presence is to create listener-interactive features. You want to cause your listeners to behave in a manner that makes it engaging to listen to your stream, out of the hundreds of thousands of streams and sites out there. So what are the ways in which this can be accomplished?

The great thing about creating and using social media sites to help promote your station is that they are free. All it requires is a little time and a pretty small learning curve. Embrace and use social media. It’s there to help you if you use it properly, and by following these few simple little guidelines, it can definitely make a difference!

More and more businesses and entrepreneurs are expanding their mobile advertising by creating custom apps for their products or services. With mobile advertising expected to outpace desktop advertising in the next 5 years, one of the best ways to take advantage of the boom is to have your own smartphone app.

With all the free streaming radio these days, you have to wonder why anyone would want to pay for streaming online radio content. There are so many smartphone apps for stations and tuner sites that you can literally be on the other side of the world, punch in your home zip code and start listening to the AM/FM spectrum from your hometown.

According to some recent numbers from Nielsen, 40.8 percent of smart phones purchased in the last six months were running Android OS, followed by 26.9 percent that were running Apple iOS and 19.2 percent that were running RIM BlackBerry OS. It looks as though the mobile advertising market is set to become the next big market for businesses and marketers.