Tonight Ken McArthur is launching his book, Impact: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions, and Make a Difference in a Noisy World
As you may know, the gurus on Top Affiliate Challenge are not being paid for their time on the show. They are volunteering their time and effort. Take a moment to pop over to Ken’s website and subscribe to his list. If you don’t know a lot about Ken, I can tell you from personal; experience he is a great guy and was selected for TAC because he is the whitest white-hat I have ever met in ANY internet related capacity.
Purchasing his book will help Ken further his reputation in the online community and will probably motivate you much as the sample chapter he sent motivated me. I JUST bought the book myself ansd I am looking forward to cashing in on all of the bonus offers others are contributing!
If you have not noticed already, the scores of people in the top 25% of the standings have been fluctuating - some wildly. The reason for the movement is our latest reaction to recent attempts to influence the standings of the competition through the submission of false votes.
In the past it has been enough for us to simply delete the fraudulent votes. After some discussions with the other producers we have decided it is time to take additional action.
We have detected everything from a rotating IP robo-voting script (and yes, we have identified the male contestant who deployed it) that was submitting thousands of votes each day to the individual user clickon on their own vote button every hour or so.
Please remember that you may only vote once per audition per day. From this point forward any use of automated voting tools will result in the disqualification of the contestant who deploys the tool. We have very detailed usage logs from this website, as well as several others that are frequented by video internet marketers. Further, we have received reports from active contestants who have named the names of people who are influencing the voting system and the methods they are using to do so.
There are still fraudulent votes in the system, and they are being detected and rooted out every day. The top 10 is pretty pure at this point. If you are hell bent on cheating, please remember that every single vote is going top be inspected by human eyes before ANYONE is selected for the show. You will eventually be caught, even if you make it to the end.
The sad thing is that some of the best videos that were submitted were submitted by less than ethical people. I was personally saddened to learn that some of my favorites that were doing so well did not belong in the top 10 at all.
This is the final warning that I will send on this matter. No one wants to work with a dishonest teammate, and there is no room for cheaters on our show.
In about 20 minutes I will be live on the web with Tracy Repchuk, author of the bestselling book 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles and host of the “Today’s Guest” on blog talk radio.
From her website:
The “TodaysGuest” FAB-5 Radio Team provides a like-minded community for entrepreneurs and those seeking an empowered and enlightened lifestyle, and introduces you to people making that happen.
We are going to be talking Top Affiliate Challenge with some interesting behind the scenes information that has never been shared before. As this interview is being conducted, the voting system at the Top Affiliate Challenge website is under a complete audit.
The top 10 is shifting as we speak, and if you want to know why, you should listen to the live show or the podcast 
That’s right folks! The producers of Top Affiliate Challenge are about to close a deal with Russwood Chrysler of Lincoln, NE to give the winner of Top Affiliate Challenge a 2 year lease on a brand new2008 Jeep Patriot!
The Jeep Patriot is the replacement for the Jeep Cherokee. Its a pretty fuel efficient vehicle (for an SUV). Russwood is also going to provide each team on Top Affiliate Challenge a minivan to shuttle them around Lincoln on the various challenges that will take place.
The Patriot starts off in the mid-$20,000 price range and goes up from there based on options.
Check out this video. Its a sandbox commercial that Jeep released for television to promote the new 2008 Jeep Patriot.
Here are some other images from the Jeep website:
So how motivated are you now to get a seat on the web’s first affiliate marketing reality show 
We’ll be waiting on your auditions
We are aware that some of the audition videos on the site are leading to 404 pages. This is an issue with Ruby on rails (the software that runs our website) and we are looking into the problem as we speak.
Please be patient while we address the issue into the evening tonight. I will let everyone know any progress we make before tomorrow morning.
We had a rash of people using copyrighted music in their audition videos over the past couple days. Revver is very strict about filtering out videos that violate artists’ copyrights.
It also takes our staff a lot of extra time to filter through which videos have been pulled from Revver and ask the contestants to resubmit.
Please do not infringe on the rights of artists in your videos. If you have a video online right now that does violate a copyright, I would strongly suggest you upload a newly edited version of the video ASAP so your audition stayts in the system’s rotation in case Revver finds and pulls your video.
Over the past three days more than 15 super votes have been purchased by contestants. From what we hear behind the scenes, contestants are taking the advice in the Top Affiliate Challenge Strategy Guide. alliances are being forged in the forum already and those who are participating are doing quite well.
Yesterday we received 5 new video submissions that are in process today, and one of them received a base score of 6. How secure are you with where you are at in the top 10 today?
With only 10 percentage points separating the #1 spot from the #10 spot, the introduction of 5 new videos tomorrow should really shake things up!
We have added a little more chrome to the Top Affiliate Challenge website over the past couple days.
First, you may have noticed a new “Statistics” link above the videos on the user pages. We always intended to make the voting process transparent. We want people to know they can trust that the voting is accurate and there is not behind the scenes manupulation going on.
What we did not think about was that if our reporting was 100% up front, that information could be used to develop and test mechanisms to game the voting process and give a contestant an unfair advantage.
We bridged that divide by installing a time delay. We are providing statistic information that tells you the average value of the votes people are casting on your video, the number of supervotes you are benefiting from, and the base score that was awarded to a video, but it is slightly delayed. The delay makes it more difficult to use the information for neffarious purposes.
Secondly, we have introduced trends in the top 10 widget that sits in the website’s left sidebar. This will tell you if you are trending up, down, or no change (note to our visually impaired users - these trends are represented by a grahic that does not have alt text - we will address that on Monday).
The trends are calculated by measuring all of the votes you have received in the past 2 hours and comparing those to your overall vote totals. Note that this trend only measures open votes and is not impacted by super votes. Hence, it is possible for someone to move from last place to first place by purchasing super votes while still “trending down.”
I have some new videos to share with you all this weekend, and hopefully will have some audio from a radio interview to post as well. Two new videos going up tomorrow
Fresh off the presses, we just received a signed contract from Pepperjam Network. They are sponsoring one of the Top Affiliate Challenge Teams which leaves one team sponsorship left. (The second one will be announced as soon as we have the signed contract in hand).
That means that four lucky contestants will be branded in Pepperjam Top affiliate Challenge shirts on arrival and will carry the banner of one of the fastest up-and-coming affiliate networks in the world.
If you have not already done so, you really need to establish a Pepperjam account so you can get a feel for the offers they have in their network. You don’t want to be the only one on your team who unprepared, do you
As you can now see on the auditions page of the Top Affiliate Challenge website, there are a LOT of users who signed up for accounts but have not uploaded auditions yet.
With audition submissions closing June 1 ( 53 days from today!) time is short to get your audition in and get into the top 10. We will accept new auditions through June 1, and voting stops on June 15.
We have decided to sweeten the pot a bit to encourage those of you who might be dragging your feet. Joel Comm has taken Top Affiliate Challenge under his wing and has offered to give a FREE copy of his acclaimed Secret Classroom DVD set to one of the people who has submitted an audition to Top Affiliate Challenge.
I was the second runner up on the Next Internet Millionaire and it has served as an inspiration for Top Affiliate Challenge in many ways. I was present to hear the instruction of all but one of the gurus who appeared on the show, and I can tell you that the Secret Classroom DVD set is a must-have for any aspiring internet marketer.
Take the Top Affiliate Challenge staff for example. One of our video editors asked if he could take a look at my copy of the secret classroom and he started watching the DVDs with his family every night. Now his wife and children all want to blog, their entrepreneurial fires have been stoked, and they finally understand the excitement I personified when I came home from the Next Internet Millionaire.
You can get your hands on the FREE copy of the Secret Classroom by simply uploading an audition video to the Top Affiliate Challenge Website. On April 14th - this coming Monday - our programming guru Adam will select one person’s audition video at random as the winner via a PHP RAND function script.
In English, all you have to do to enter is get a video online ASAP! This DVD set is a $500 value and Joel Comm was extremely generous to give us this as a prize. Take a moment to thank him by visiting his newly redesigned blog at http://www.joelcomm.com and posting a thank you comment.
If you need some extra time to get your audition together, we have another free gift coming up soon from Eric Holmlund, the director of the Next Internet Millionaire. Stay tuned….