New Swindon Town signing Ollie Clarke said that there is no secret formula to earning promotion from League Two.

The 31-year-old became Town’s first signing of the summer as he arrived for an undisclosed fee from Mansfield Town, where he earned his second promotion from this level last season and joins a Swindon side who have ambitions to do the same.

Clarke said that in his experience there was no special trick to winning promotion, you simply have to do all of the fundamentals properly to be successful.

He said: “When I spoke to the club it was coming from the Head of Football that they were interested in signing players that had been there and done it to give their all, and that is something I do as a given, I try my hardest every day and put my body on the line to get results.

“When I spoke to the manager about how he wanted to play and improve from last season then it was a no-brainer because I know that this league does have quality but it is more about consistency and having a group of players that are willing to run around and try their hardest every week.

“That was the foundations we built a couple of solid seasons on at Mansfield, we ran hard and we trained hard and that is what I will be trying to get across to the players here.

“There is no secret ingredient, you go out and you work hard and nine times out of ten the quality will come through from that and you get the result.”

After three seasons of narrowly missing out on promotion, Mansfield finally got the job done last season and Clarke spoke about the lessons he learned from that.

He said: “I think that a lot of the time we only concentrated on ourselves and what we were good at and there were a few different things over the years like we would always find we conceded too many goals.

“Signing experienced defenders and having quality in defence to keep clean sheets helped us, in the first few seasons we were good going forward and we tried to play out, but signing someone like Aden Flint last summer really helped us.

“It is not going to be pretty football every week, we want to play nice football, but sometimes you have to get the ball up the pitch and we can defend from there.”