Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The quarterly performance of Yahoo (YHOO) under new CEO and founder Jerry Yang, exceeded expectations, with revenue increasing, although net profits dropped by 5 percent. Even so, analysts and investors were heartened by the news, and the stock performed well after hours.

Still, this is only the first step in turning things around. Yang outlined three core objectives he says the company will focus on accomplishing over the next several years.

1. Yang's first priority, is to make Yahoo the place where people want to start off on the Internet. They are particulary strong with Yahoo Finance, sports and news, along with Yahoo Mail for email.

2. Secondly, Yang was to make Yahoo "the" place for advertisers and marketers, getting a larger portion of the ad spend of companies through increasing the number of ads being sold on the site.

3. Yang wants to take a page from the Facebook strategy, by building services on open APIs, which would then attract developers.

The continuing story of Yahoo is of course untapped and unrealized potential. They have a huge web presence of 477 million users, and increase of 14 percent over last year. That is the "largest user base on the web," according to Yahoo president Sue Decker. The number of page views also grew by 20 percent over last year. So they're getting the right content up there.

To me, Yahoo is positioned great for the future. They should put their greatest focus on increasing display ad sales, with a secondary focus on search. If they get caught up with the search category, they could suddenly find themselves losing the display ad war as well, which they are particularly strong in.

The company also says it is going to increase its social networking and user-generated content strategy, relying less on original content. That would go a long way to decrease costs; something they seem to be struggling with at this time.

I think it's time for Yahoo to start executing, not only talk strategies and wishful thinking. They should take advantage of their huge visitors and new advertising deals in place. They are in the position where they should have competitors chasing after them, rather than the other way around.

They still seem a little tentative and too cautious. Now that they have a plan, they need to take it down to the street level and put it into practical application. They need to get their swagger back and get more aggressive.