Have you ever watched longingly as other bloggers flaunt their engagement with their audience, while you cry alone in an empty comments corner?

Ever wonder what you’ve been doing so wrong when you try to boost blog audience engagement for your clients (or for yourself)? Chances are, what you’re doing isn’t wrong, but it may just not be enough.

Maybe you’ve been admiring your audience from afar. Pull them close.

Perhaps you’ve been flirting coyly for a while from your blogging balcony. Take them by the hand.

But you just haven’t mustered the right energy to compel your readers to take the plunge. Kneel down and put a ring on it.

Keeping an audience engaged with your writing is a key skill that all clients need you to possess. It’s also the foundation upon which a deeper writer-reader relationship is built, which can be particularly important with ongoing projects and retainer clients.

It takes consistent commitment to deliver on your promise of engaging content, ensuring that your readers can comprehend it, relate to it, learn from it, feel something about it, and do something with it.

If you’re ready to hear your audience shout, “We’re engaged!” then you need these five tips:

It’s finally happened. You’ve landed your dream gig.

You’ll be writing for an existing business blog in your favorite industry. The work is consistent, and the pay is amazing.

Then, when you’re in the middle of discussing potential blog topics with your new client, it happens.

You discover they have no idea who their company’s audience is.

Your stomach drops as you realize this gig isn’t going to be as smooth as you envisioned. Your dream job is quickly turning into a nightmare…

As a fellow freelance blogger, I’ve been there. And the truth is that while there is a way to solve this issue, you need to be cautious. Learn from my experiences in how to build a blog audience for a client who’s been doing it all wrong:

“Time is money”… whether you like it or not.

After all, the faster you write, the more money you earn by the hour on per-post or per-project rates.

When I started freelance blogging, it took me a long time to get 500 words done – about one afternoon, I’d say. I realized that, if this was going to be my main income, I’d have to boost my productivity so I could get more writing done in a day.

So, I started googling articles on productivity and drew on fellow freelancer’s experiences to try to find out what would best suit me.

But here’s the thing, though: most productivity methods just didn’t do the trick for me.

For instance: almost every article I read quoted the Pomodoro Technique, which can be great for certain activities but, as a writer, it didn’t do me any good. In fact, some productivity methods just made me anxious, which ended doing more harm than good.

After gathering a few bits and pieces of many different blog posts and testing out a few methods of my own, I came up with six hacks to speed up my writing. In a matter of weeks, I went from writing 500 words in an afternoon to 1000 words in an hour.