25 Mark Asquith Digital Agency Owner in the U.K.
Mark Asquith – Digital WordPress Agency
Mark Asquith is an amazing man. I’ve been online for quite a while and it’s always a pleasure speaking with people I admire. What really impressed me about Mark is that he truly is a genuine person. So many times I’ve had an opportunity to meet someone that I’ve looked up to only to be dissappointed by their demeanor and this is definitely not the case with Mark. He deserves all the accolades he’s achieved and will achieve in the future.
I am a bit of an enigma. I am a typical millenial. -Mark Asquith
Mark is the founder of a digital agency DMSQD in the UK, the podcast Excellence Expected, Two Shots to the Head which is a geek culture show and PodcastWebsites.com. He is a busy person. His design agency was voted as one of the top 40 design agencies in the UK by a collection of their peers. His agency specializes in helping his clients make more money online by incorporating high-class design, web development and app development including all the marketing outreach.
Excellence Expected is a podcast show about defining, challenging and conquering the day-to-day problems that we all face being an entrepreneur. He interviews today’s biggest thought leader’s and experts in specific industries. Each episode he challenges one specific problem and the expert delivers actionable takeaways to overcome that specific problem. Experts such as John Lee Dumas, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Kells and Dragon’s Den Dragons who share what they’ve learned and overcame in their own business.
Growing Your Day-to-Day Productivity
When Mark started his show he really wanted to find a way where he could give people extra value. He thought about what he’d been through and so he began researching time management solutions. He wanted to be able to create a way to work less and have a bigger impact on his business. If he should up and worked for 15 hours a day with the only thing he had to show for it was a couple small job wins versus working for a lot less per day and get much bigger deals, which has the most impact and which one is more happy with?
So Mark wrote a book called “The Essential 14-Day Guide to Cutting Your Working Hours and Increasing Your Impact“. The book is Mark’s process as to how he approaches his business on a daily basis. The by-product is not only having an impact on the business, but it’s how your time grows for a strong personal life because you aren’t focused purely on this false productivity. The book is not just a book, but Mark included a workbook within it to help anyone lay out their day that will help enhance your day-to-day productivity on all aspects of your business and personal life.
Mark’s Take on WordPress
Mark Asquith uses WordPress a lot. He likes to push it to it’s limits of what WordPress can do. As an agency, Mark doesn’t want it to be only about delivering the visual or the responsive elements, but to make sure that every part of the publishing process and the back end can be done very easily. Creating a user-friendly experience is paramount to providing a great content management system that is WordPress.
One of the things we spoke about was WordPress plugins. Make sure that when you are using plugins that you are utilizing plugins from a reputable devloper. Make sure to look at the star rating system and read through the comments. Also, be wary of “unused” plugins. By doing this, it may open you up to security issues and may really slow down the performance of your site. Always pay attention to how many plugins you are using on the site to keep and maintain your site.
Mark’s favorite plugin is SEO by Yoast. The beauty about Yoast not only provides user’s with a user-friendly solution, but this also explains why a user is doing this and what the outcome may be. Yoast is very active with their audience and they provide continual updates.
What is Podcast Websites?
Mark is currently working with John Lee Dumas on a new project called PodcastWebsites.com. It basically gives people the flexibility of WordPress, but all of the support of an “all-in-one” platform. For anyone that podcasts, you will want to use, typically, one of two things. One is WordPress system which requires a designer, a developer and someone to support it. The alternative is something that is built on a proprietary system that can provide for challenges in scalability.
What PodcastWebsites.com does is that it bridges the two of these solutions together. You have a WordPress website with complete support 24/7, manage emails, themes and all sorts of other benefits within the WordPress system. More importantly, because it’s written by both Mark Asquith and John Lee Dumas, they have been able to take WordPress platform and incorporate everything that podcasters need.
With regard to podcast hosting, anyone can integrate their existing hosting service (btw, that’s not what we are wanting to do), but we have created a service to host your podcast as well. The goal was to publish a podcast in a simpler way. When you are ready to publish your podcast, you can drag the media file into the WordPress just like a picture and the system is smart enought to know that this is a podcast. It will automatically send it off to the podcast host and it will send a call that verifies the media file back into the WordPress system that will get embedded into the post.
The migration end of things, user’s can easily move through a wizard to migrate their existing WordPress site over to PodcastWebsites.com fairly easy. With regard to the podcast hosting, Mark is going to be very careful because this is vital to podcasters. What Mark is doing is undertaking this through a very small select group of what Mark calls “Beeta” group, or beta group as we in the US refer to it as to figure out a user-friendly and operational podcast hosting migration solution.
If you want to learn more about or connect with Mark Asquith, check out his links below:
DMSQD Digital Agency Website
Excellence Expected Podcast Website
Excellence Expected Podcast on iTunes
Two Shots to the Head Website
Podcast Websites on Facebook
Send Mark a Tweet – @DMSQD
Connect with Mark Asquith on LinkedIn
Join Mark Asquith on Google Plus
Join Mark Asquith on YouTube
Here is a link for the plugin Mark recommended called WordPress SEO by Yoast: WordPress SEO by Yoast
Here are the highlights of my awesome conversation with Mark Asquith if you are in a hurry:
- Who is Mark Asquith? (2:35 Mark)
- Find out what Mark gives away for free? (7:41 Mark)
- Mark talks about WordPress. (11:50 mark)
- How to keep your WordPress site running effeciently? (13:40 mark)
- Mark’s favorite WordPress plugin? (16:05 Mark)
- What is Mark working on right now? (18:13 mark)
- Where does Mark see podcasts going in 2015? (26:44 mark)
- What was Mark’s break away moment in his life? (32:50 Mark)
- Mark’s words of wisdom? (38:24 Mark)
Stop Riding the Pine is a lot of fun and we love sharing the shows we’ve done. We would greatly appreciate your assistance in helping us grow this show by not only downloading the episodes, but also sharing them. Leave comments and rate our show so we can make the show even better.
About Jaime Jay
Meet Jaime Jay – a man who wears many hats, and wears them all admirably. He's a master connector, an entrepreneur extraordinaire, and a published author who knows how to get things done.
Before he found his way to the business world, Jaime served his country as a brave paratrooper in the U.S. Army. But that's just the beginning of his many accomplishments.
He's the founder of the renowned Bottleneck Distant Assistant Services firm, and his book "Quit Repeating Yourself" has become a must-read for entrepreneurs everywhere.
When he's not busy building his empire, you can find him on his beloved Harley Davidson, cruising through the countryside and taking in the invigorating effects of Uitwaaien – a Dutch practice that involves facing the wind to boost health and relieve stress.
He enjoys spending his free time outside building stuff with his wife, Nikita the dog and their two kittens (for now at least) Tommy and Tater.
He is ‘over-the-moon’ happily married to his wonderful wife Sara, his amazing daughter, Jessica, who is serving our country as a United States Army soldier. Jaime and Sara are the proud grand parents of two beautiful little girls.
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