What can a Yahoo! shift teach you?

Radio use is declining. Newspaper circulation is in free-fall. Television ratings are collapsing. There is a common-thread to these three story lines. It’s not the internet. And, it carries a profitable lesson for you.

Shrinking audience share isn’t confined to traditional media. Yahoo! is shuttering its paid search to concentrate on display advertising and develop more and better content. Speculation by the internet cognoscenti points at this change as more evidence that Yahoo! will outsource its search functions to Microsoft’s Bing. But, that’s not the story that matters where you’re concerned.

Yahoo! bungled their early advantages by failing to generate sufficiently compelling content. As Google PacManned one user-driven experience after another, Yahoo! reacted by taking their eye off the content ball. The rest is a matter of journalism.

Compelling content is the missing ingredient in television, radio, and newspaper. It’s what Yahoo! is now scrambling to generate.

How compelling is your content?

Droning on about your company’s experience, your selection, your staff, your sales isn’t compelling. Content becomes compelling when it matters enough to become more interesting to your customer than what they’re already thinking about. All the search engine management you can buy won’t net conversion results if you don’t give visitors a meaningful payoff for their search.

Compelling content centers on your customer’s hopes, dreams, and felt-needs. Does yours?

Measure your content’s focus using the We-We Monitor from Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg‘s FutureNow, Inc.. Enter your URL and company name, click submit, and pucker up. The Customer Focus Calculator‘s results will point you in the right direction. What you do with this new awareness will determine what a Yahoo! blunder teaches you.

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