David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

Christmas. It comes around but once a year and an early indication of it drawing ever near was when Affiliate Window’s Awinter Wonderland was kick-started.

A collection of merchant news, offers, deals, affiliate incentives and competitions, I always had a fondness for Awinter Wonderland. However, this year they’ve opted for something different.

Continuing with Digital Window’s amalgamation of Affiliate Window and Buy.at, they have recently launched a new portal called The Hub. Dubbed "the best way to keep up to date on programme news and promotions", The Hub draws together the premise behind Awinter Wonderland but extends it to run all year around.

The Hub is a new and single permanent portal for both Affiliate Window and Buy.at and brings together updates and promotions from merchants, news from both networks and a rather handy calendar of events.
 


The site is based on a Wordpress installation and is really easy to use. It’s easy to navigate and filter news, promotions, etc. It was inevitable that eventually somewhere was required to centrally house all the news, deals and promotions available for affiliates to publish as Digital Window has a mind-boggling amount of merchants to promote (circa 1,650).

I do have a couple of criticisms though. Personally, I liked the festive charm of Awinter Wonderland which seems to have been lost in The Hub. The site seems very text heavy and as an affiliate, whilst I like concise and to-the-point text some images go down well too.

I also can’t seem to find anything that relates to affiliate incentives or competitions (including the Digital Window Christmas competitions). I’m often swayed by affiliate incentives more so than merchant promotions so personally I’d prefer to see the addition of a category that kept affiliates up-to-date with potential competitions they could enter.

My other criticism is that it doesn’t seem to integrate all that well with Darwin. My preference would have to been to embed The Hub into Darwin making it much easier to grab links, banners, etc. Perhaps a future development of The Hub will see quick link icons from news and resources to merchant pages within Darwin. I’ve seen a sign up link (e.g. Thorntons) but it would be great if that could be split up to show quick link icons such as:

Join | Merchant Profile | Text Links | Banners

Overall I feel it is a great resource that helps begin to concentrate all the merchant noise into one place for affiliates. A few affiliate friendly options such as the quick link icons, a category for affiliate incentives/competitions and some more pictures to jazz up the area would be welcomed but no doubt it will evolve over time into a key affiliate tool.