Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 hour work week recently posted 5 Uncommon Timesavers for bloggers on problogger. These two caught my eye because they’re both very common for me to do, so I thought I would pass it along.

2. Post less to be read more.

No matter how good your material is, too much of it can cause feed-overwhelm and unsubscribes. Based on input from close to a dozen top bloggers I’ve interviewed, it takes an average of three days for a new post to propagate well in the blogosphere. If you write too often, pushing down the previous post and its visibility, you decrease the reach of each post, run the risk of increasing unsubscribes, and create more work for yourself. Test posting 2-4 times per week—my preference is two—and don’t feel compelled to keep up with the frequency “you have to post three times before lunch” Joneses. Quality, not quantity, is what spreads.

3. Define the lead and close, then fill it in.

This is a habit I picked up from John McPhee, a master of writing structure and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. Decide on your first or last sentence/question/scene, then fill in the rest. If you can’t decide on the lead, start with the close and work backwards.

A good formula for the lead, which I learned from a Wired writer, is: first sentence or paragraph is a question or situation involving a specific person, potentially including a quote; second paragraph is the “nutgraph,” where you explain the trend or topic of the post, perhaps including a statistic, then close the paragraph explaining what you’ll teach (the “nut”) the reader if they finish the post.

#2, Posting Less To Be Read More is a concept I got a long time ago. There’s even a Sticky Post WordPress Plugin that’s available that allows you to post your new posts past the one you want to highlight or bring attention to. Leaving your post on the front page, at the top gets it a lot of exposure so if it’s something you are encouraging comments on, or are marketing something, leave it there for a few days and take your off day from blogging to promote it. Spend your time marketing the post, generating links, use stumbleupon.com, Digg, Reddit.com etc and really hammer home the attention to it. The other option of course is the plugin I mentioned, Lester Chan’s Wp-Sticky (here’s a demo of wp-sticky)The plugin allows you to specify which post number you want to leave at the top and for how long. It’s like a “sticky post”. I haven’t used it yet, but it’s certainly in my bookmarks and ready to be pulled out, uploaded and installed when I do. Lester had two other WordPress Plugins that I use, namely Wp-Polls and Wp-Print on my Former Fat Guy Blog and I love them both. Thanks Lester!

Timothy Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business week bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek., Visit Timothy’s blog at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

Depending on how you’ve installed WordPress (manually or by a “one-click-install” that many hosting providers offer) – one of the very last installation steps is to choose a blog name and provide an email address. That’s where this checklist begins. Click on a heading below to get started!

1. Create blog title, add email address
2. Change your password
3. Disable visual rich editor
4. Add users
5. Change the tagline
6. Edit Membership permissions
7. Set a date and time format
8. Modify Reading and Writing settings
9. Edit Discussion settings
10. Modify Permalinks structure
11. Pick a theme
12. Customize your theme
13. Write down CSS info
14. Change title format
15. Edit blogroll
16. Edit the About page
17. Add some categories
18. Edit the example post for testing
19. Install plugins
20. Check blog and test plugins
21. Create a favicon.ico
22. Create a shortcut to the Dashboard / setup WordPress client
23. Start posting

I will be going through this WordPress post install checklist one by one in greater detail at a later date

Google may only look at the first 1000 characters of your blog pages, so a good practice is to use the “more” feature just shortly after the introduction paragraph, or just a few more characters into the blog post. Consider grabbing their attention with the first paragraph, then hooking the reader by using the “split post” tag also known as the “more” tag. Grab their attention, then ask them to “click here to read more” (what the “more” tag does).

By doing this, you can keep your front page at 5 to 10 posts but they’re so short, that Google spiders the entire front page and catches everything. It also allows your readers to browse the front page and see what sort of things you write about.

Then there’s the little issue of how the archives work. Generally, the archives are limited to the first paragraph, so again, you’re being efficient at informing the reader about your post and it carries over automatically to the archives.

The Facebook app “Notes” allows you to import automatically from your blog feeds right into your mini feed, alerting your friends and profile viewers about your new blog post. They make a decision about your post based on the title of your blog post and then the first paragraph they read. If they like it and it’s informative (ie: tell them what you’re going to tell them), and relative to what they want to know, that first paragraph is the “GO – NOGO” decision to visit your site.

If people are limiting the amount of info they read in their rss feed reader, the first 100 to 250 words are critical. Again, based on the description, it’s the GO – NOGO about visiting your site and reading the post.

Tip for the week: Be aware. Be open to learning. Pay attention to what you’re seeing when you read blog posts, rss feed snippets and other blogs “first paragraphs”. How can you learn from what others are doing and what do you notice about how they could improve. Use what you learn to improve your own first blog paragraphs.

The first paragraph can be critical in the decision process to whether or not your reader visits your blog, continues to read the post and or even stays on your website. Your first paragraph can be beneficial in Google spidering your site, you getting listed and being identified in the search engines. If your interest is in increasing your income, then visitors and eyeballs are what you need. If your interest is spreading the word, or sharing your thoughts to as many people as possible, write a great informative first paragraph. As my English teacher taught me in grade 10, “Tell me what you’re going to tell me, Tell Me, and then tell me what you told me”.