Wharton recently published an article on managing in an upturn, quoting famed Wharton professors Morris Cohen, Lawrence Hrebiniak, Peter Cappelli, and Oliver Chatain. The article offered up some very sound advice on how to successfully manage your business through the upcoming upturn. Buried among the nuggets of insight, which, by the way, echo many of the sentiments that I’ve shared over the last year, was one by Olivier Chatain that couldn’t be more timely.

According to Chatain, areas of opportunity can be found in products or computing software that increase productivity and companies that sell these types of products and services should be ramping up production and marketing now. I wholeheartedly agree. Even Forrester has found that investment in procurement technology continues. After all, what other vertical offers software that, when properly applied, can lower transaction costs while reducing purchasing costs?

Vendors, this is the quarter where many of your potential customers will be fighting for budget to acquire new sourcing and procurement solutions to help them increase efficiency and lower costs in the year ahead. This means that now is the time you want your brand to be front and center, because most budget requests are made based on the “baked-in” cost of the preferred solution… yours!

So where should you put your marketing dollars? Well, as far as I’m concerned, you should spend some of them on one of the leading blogs that attract thousands of readers every day and tens of thousands of readers every month. There’s a big difference between push and pull when it comes to web information. While the first model might be accompanied by distribution lists of an impressive size, the reality is that over 90% of people don’t read the vast majority of information pushed at them (think about how much “junk” mail you open). But when someone chooses to visit a site, that’s a reader who is actually interested in what that site has to say — 10,000 unique visitors to a pull-blog are more valuable than 100,000 “subscribers” of a push e-mail list. Much more.

If you would like to sponsor Sourcing Innovation, which reaches over 10,000 unique readers who are now making around 50,000 visits to almost 200,000 pages every month, information can be found on the side bar to the right of this page.