Always use dry wood. No matter how many times this is written it can not be emphasized more. Use dry wood, and seasoned as long as possible (two years is best for many species, especially in a cool humid climate-where I grew up on Canada's wet northwest coast it was very important). Wasting your BTU's drying wood inside your woodstove (which is what happens as it burns) is a waste of fuel, and it dramatically increases your risk of a chimney fire by having moisture cling flammable creosote to your upper chimney.
Have wood stored off the ground (I have pallets as the floor in the woodshed), with a good wide roof to keep it dry with lots of airflow. Make sure your stove, chimney and all it's parts are functioning well.
Sort your wood in your woodpile/shed so that you have some wood available that burns hot quickly. Quick-Hot burning wood is often lighter thin wood that is not ideal for a long lasting fire, but is perfect for getting a proper draft going quickly. That, and having more of the wood's resinous cellular tissue exposed is one of the primary reasons why people split wood into thinner pieces. Red cedar, and brush wood like willow, and branches from poplar trees are perfect for this. Denser/larger wood is good for a long lasting fire which is efficient when the fire is already going and you want the wood to last a bit longer, but not when initiating it. Splitting that denser wood down to smaller bits helps a lot. If you live in a very humid place, only split wood down to kindling just before you are going to use it. Exposing kindling to moist air for an extended period is not in your interest. Knowing your tree/wood species and the type of fire that they produce is very important if you want to have efficient fires in wood stoves.
As a forest fire fighter and as a kid learning about fire, you come to know that fire needs three things: Temperature, Fuel, and Oxygen. You can stop a fire by eliminating any of the three. To get a fire initiated you need to have these things working for you, not against you.
As Ben Z mentioned, the key to getting the fire ripping along quickly at the onset is to have smaller kindling. There is a reason that matchsticks are thin. Small, dry, resinous, or less dense wood tends to burn up fast, throwing heat. Mors Kochanski's book Bushcraft; Outdoor Skills And Wilderness Survival, details lighting fires in the bush including tinder and kindling in much greater quantity than most people would ever consider. Well, consider it. If you want your fire ripping hot fast, then this is the way. Breaking wood into smaller bits, splitting it, etc, helps to expose more surface area/mass to the flames/heat. Ben Z uses a torch when he can to get his fire started. A lighter is also more effective than a match, but not nearly as much as a torch, clearly. For emergency camping I have a small butane torch that is about twice the size of a lighter.
A Bellows 
turns any flame or coal into a torch if you know how to use it. Paper and cardboard (particularly if shredded) is your friend as is resinous bark like birch bark, and fatwood works very well too. Get that fire ripping hot right away, and it will be much easier to have it work efficiently to heat in the coming stages.
A tipi shape channels the most heated air and flames to the central point at it's peak and so is generally most efficient, but a cabin shape burns quite well too.
I find that a rectangular cabin (long in the draft direction, filled with fine material is quite an efficient tinder/kindling set up. Depending on where your stove's air intake is, and on the size of the firebox, a bed of wood pieces laid out under your fire set up all in parallel to one another and in line with your draft direction can be a better place for your coals to land than in a puffy bed of soft ashes (which should be on the inside base of your firebox to protect it's bottom bricks or stove bottom from overheating, and abuse). Once these get involved in the fire you have a large bed of coals much more quickly and efficiently produced. This is also a good way to have a fire on deep snow.
Similarly to Ben's post above, when starting a fire in a woodstove, I put a couple of pieces parallel to the draft flow in the fire but on the outside of the kindling. This does two things. The first is that it channels more of the air flow from the air intake to the draft/chimney though the kindling zone, exactly where you need it. The second is that it preheats the wood, preparing it for starting later. Somewhat contradicting the idea of channeling all the air in that way, I also put some kindling underneath this wood at the door side edge. This allows the heat and fire to go underneath it. The benefit is that getting this wood burning early on will throw heat to the sides of the woodstove where the majority of your fire bricks are. Getting these bricks hot is partly what makes the stove radiate efficiently.
Another way to get these bricks hot is to make a kindling fire larger and longer lasting in the first place, eliminating the larger pieces for a while. A couple stokings of the fire with small fast burning material gets the stove hot faster. Contrary to the purpose of this thread, THIS IS WASTEFUL-but it gets the stove bricks and stove radiating faster. This is also helpful if the local weather/atmospheric conditions are not helping your draft get established.
I use this method only getting a sauna ripping fast or when I lived in a small cabin if I had been away for a day or more and the fire had been out for an extended period.
When I was a little kid my slightly older friend (aged 6 and 8 I think-left alone!) and I completely filled a woodstove at his place with cedar kindling and paper and lit it up. Parts of the iron were glowing a frightening red hot really super fast. I do not recommend doing this EVER! We were very afraid that we might burn his house down. I think I was close to tears.
In addition to this little pyromaniac project being generally extremely irresponsible and super stupid on the parts of us boys, his dad was the fire chief and my dad was the assistant chief which would have not been a very good story for the newspaper or the fire department! Fortunately, the fire died down quickly as rapid kindling always does, so it was all good in the end and nobody was the wiser. Phew! What a relief! We would have had our asses well tanned for that.
The added expense of burning more kindling in the case of doing something similar on purpose (and not so ridiculous/extreme/dangerous) was made up by the fact that the rest of the cabin was warmed up that much quicker. This was particularly of benefit when I was wet or cold or both coming home. This was NEVER a regular method for home heating needs. The fire is for you. Figure out what your needs specifically are in the moment or regularly, and make the fire that suits those needs. But always do it safely.
On that point, a really hot fire is not always what is needed. You may only require that the fire is radiating at it's hottest for a relatively short period in the day, or perhaps twice a day. Figure out the best times to have the fire at it's maximum will save you fuel in the end.
Isolate your woodstove room from other rooms that do not need as much heating. If you have multiple rooms, like a pantry, a bathroom, an entrance room, etc, and they do not have doors, then make a door out of curtains, or a blanket. Even if they have a door, a curtain or a blank will be helpful. Similarly, cover your windows when they are not providing external thermal solar gain. A bedroom's ideal temperature Best Temperature for Sleep Based on Age is not the same as your comfortable room temperature where you hang out during the day or evening. Find out what your ideal sleeping temperature, put a thermometer in your bedroom and don't heat the room beyond this.
Exercise. If you are just sitting around at home all day, you will not be generating as much heat within yourself as you would if you were moving about. A bit more moving around helps to keep your body warm. It actually doesn't take much to do this, and it is a surprisingly efficient way to feel warmer in a colder space. Even a chair workout (as done by seniors or movement impaired people) can be good for this. Having a workout routine is of great benefit to your body heating needs. Just getting up and doing some deep knee bends and touching your toes engages large muscle groups that have been inactive. This is quite warming with a series of repetitions with little actual effort or strain.
The previous statement noted, a comfy upholstered chair will act as a thermal mass holding your body heat that has been radiating and conducting into it. So the longer that you are sitting in one spot that is acting this way, the warmer you will potentially feel (until you reach some kind of equilibrium with it's potential dynamic potential and it's intrinsic heat loss) A cat or a small dog, knowing this, will often sit in a chair that was recently left unattended.
Winter isn't T-shirt weather, so wearing sweaters or a hat even indoors will keep your body warm and you do not need to have as hot a fire going.
There are legal requirements when placing wood near a woodstove that a person should know, but they would be similar to the building codes for how close a stove can be from an unprotected wall. The stove has specific requirements for distance to flammable objects. At any rate, store some of your next wood-to-be-burned at that distance, which will preheat it (when your wood outside is stored well below freezing this makes a big difference).
When I was a kid, we had an additional woodshed as a room in our basement. It was about half the size of an average small bedroom. This wood was thus preheated to something close to room temperature long before it was burned. After I was around 8 or so, it was my chore to have this woodstove filled with split wood, and kindling prepared at all times.
Sit near the stove. In my small cabin, my desk was right beside my stove. There I could read or write in comfort with the least fire going. I also had a hammock that I could hook up at any time and it swung right in front of the stove.
Drink warm drinks. Coffee, hot chocolate, tea, herbal brews, broths whatever. I have a mug of hot spiced cider with me right now. Warm yourself internally.
A large (canning style) pot of water on top of the woodstove acts as a thermal battery. If you are living off-grid, this water can be used for washing yourself or dishes, etc. I've seen a large workshop with several barrels of water near the woodstove.
A catalytic barrel as part of the chimney also can increase your efficiency by burning up some of that energy that would normally go up and out your chimney. This image is a double barrel stove which is surprisingly efficient for radiant heat. We had one of these homemade in my dad's workshop when I was growing up.
Like with most stove systems, these require that a person have some working woodstove knowledge to install and use safely and efficiently.
Fans. Although fans are using energy, they are an efficient way to move warm air. An intake tube with a fan at the ceiling above the woodstove that brings that warmest air to the far side of the room at floor level can make a massive difference on how comfortable your room is. Any fan will help take warmed air that might otherwise be wasted at ceiling level and move it around. We had a fan from our basement woodstove that blew air upstairs into the living room above and fans internally in the stove walls that sent air out the front. Figure out where you want your heat and blow it there.
Maybe I'm weird but I like thermometers. Having them in multiple rooms allows me to understand what temperatures I actually want them to be at.
Practice and experiment with your wood stove and get to know it. Each one is different and needs it's own specific techniques.
