Ms Gillard made time for the meeting between visiting Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and making her maiden appearance with world leaders at the Asia-Europe meeting in Brussels.
It was a highly symbolic move that could potentially pay huge dividends when the host of the 2022 competition is named on December 2 in Switzerland.
Australia's major rivals for the 2022 tournament are largely considered to be the US and Qatar with the latter coming in for criticism by FIFA's six-man inspection team last month for their bid posing "logistical challenges".
Ms Gillard is renowned for her negotiating skills, having only just recently formed alliances with Greens and Independent MPs to cling onto power in a hung parliament.
Half-hearted, last-gasp attempts do not go down well with the big wigs of heavyweight sporting organisations such as FIFA or the International Olympic Committee.
Her US counterpart Barack Obama showed exactly how not to do it during Chicago's unsuccessful campaign to win the rights to host the 2016 Olympics.
The US President made a late dash to Copenhagen last year to lobby for his former hometown only for the Windy City to be the first knocked out in the voting of the final four cities.
Mr Obama has enough on his plate handling domestic problems at home to try to play catch up with Ms Gillard's strategic move.
The federal Labor government has already invested heavily in the bid by pumping $45 million into the campaign and Ms Gillard's courting of Mr Blatter on his own door stop two months out from the voting reinforced that commitment.
"I obviously urged him to see the merits of Australia's bid for the World Cup," Gillard said of the meeting in Brussels on Sunday night.
Australia's distance from the rest of the world and need to build stadia don't look like such big problems if the highly-pragmatic FIFA president is on board.
Ms Gillard did not say whether she thought the meet had improved Australia's prospects.
"I suspect inherent in the job of being president of FIFA is that you are pretty good at holding your cards close to your chest," she said.
"And at the end of the day this is a voting structure and so the votes will come in, in December.
"So we were in his terms like a Formula One driver at the starting line with the car fully fuelled and the engine is on, whether we will win the race we will know in December."
