The 31st Olympic Games kicked off last week in Rio de Janeiro, and there will cer­tain­ly be no short­age of link builders stay­ing up late to draw inspi­ra­tion from the fes­tiv­i­ties.

There are a few things to be aware of — as well as the usu­al chal­lenges that come with link build­ing, there are a few more restric­tions on the ways in which you can use the Olympics to pro­mote your brand.

It’s nev­er been more impor­tant for us to be resource­ful and imag­i­na­tive – for­tu­nate­ly, Gina Hutch­ings from Recep­tion­al has six Olympic-inspired link build­ing ideas to get you going.

1. Break a record

With ath­letes from across the globe vying to break records at this year’s games, con­sid­er devel­op­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice that will break some records of your own – it’ll form the basis of a great mar­ket­ing sto­ry and nat­u­ral­ly attract links on a mass scale.

Edin­burgh brew­ery Brew­dog, for exam­ple, made a name for them­selves by cre­at­ing the world’s strongest and most expen­sive beer and, espe­cial­ly for the Olympics, a beer that con­tained six sub­stances that ath­letes are banned from con­sum­ing!

2. Find the human connection

If you’re read­ing this, it’s unlike­ly you’ll be an offi­cial Olympics brand part­ner and as such you won’t be allowed to direct­ly men­tion the games in your link build­ing efforts.

With a lit­tle cre­ative­ly, that’s not a prob­lem; find­ing a com­mon emo­tion lies at the heart of mar­ket­ing suc­cess, and when it comes to the Olympics, there are plen­ty of emo­tions you can indi­rect­ly align your­self with.

From tri­umph in the face of adver­si­ty to the sup­port of an athlete’s moth­er (like in Proc­tor & Gamble’s tear-jerk­ing cam­paign), news­jack­ing, and great sto­ry­telling will again help you to attract links on en masse.

3. Create an awesome graphic

Cre­at­ing link­able assets is a great way to ensure you are cit­ed as the source of an orig­i­nal piece of research or graph­ic.

Graph­ics illus­trat­ing the men’s 100m world record pro­gres­sion like the one below are a great exam­ple of what you can do with a lit­tle imag­i­na­tion and a cre­ative design­er – notice again how the link to the Olympics is com­plete­ly indi­rect.

Info­graph­ics are always pop­u­lar too – for exam­ple, you could pro­vide read­ers with a break­down of the most gold medal-win­ning ath­letes of all time.

4. Competitions

Com­pe­ti­tions can help you secure links across a num­ber of high-qual­i­ty web­sites that are rel­e­vant to your sec­tor and mar­ket.

And, if the prize has mass appeal and share­abil­i­ty, even bet­ter – just be sure to weigh up the cost of your prize and com­pe­ti­tion place­ment with how much SEO ben­e­fit your link is like­ly to give.

For exam­ple, you could run a com­pe­ti­tion for the dura­tion of the games where con­tes­tants have to do ‘some­thing’ for the time it takes Usain Bolt to run 100 metres (9.58 sec­onds).

Chal­lenges could include record­ing a video of peo­ple try­ing to tie their shoelaces, eat­ing a banana or down­ing a pint with­in that time lim­it.

By offer­ing a high-val­ue prize of some­thing like £1,000 for the fun­ni­est video, the com­pe­ti­tion could even go viral like the ice buck­et chal­lenge (okay, maybe not on that grand a scale, but you get the idea).

5. Go guerrilla

You could, of course, throw cau­tion to the wind and court con­tro­ver­sy by cam­paign­ing against cer­tain aspects of the games, like the trade­mark­ing of Olympic-relat­ed hash­tags.

For exam­ple, Brooks Run­ning Co. launched an anony­mous protest against Rule 40, which bans any par­tic­i­pant in the Olympics from cap­i­tal­is­ing on their own image for adver­tis­ing pur­pos­es with­in the black­out peri­od.

The sports­wear brand sent a bill­board truck around a uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus with provoca­tive slo­gans such as: “Not pic­tured here: an ath­lete liv­ing below the pover­ty line to bring glo­ry to their coun­try,” and secret­ly dis­trib­uted t‑shirts and stick­ers.

Tech­ni­cal­ly, speak­ing out against the rule isn’t against the rule itself.

If you’re slop­py enough when you buy your campaign’s web­site domain, like Brooks’ par­ent com­pa­ny Berk­shire Hath­away were when they reg­is­tered Rule40.com, you could be lucky enough to get found out by the major news out­lets and find your­self links in.

6. Tap into the Fitspo fam

Okay, so you might not be allowed to use the offi­cial Olympic hash­tags on social media – but there’s noth­ing to stop you tap­ping into the #fit­spo and #fit­fam crowd.

Healthy liv­ing is all the rage right now and with the Olympics going on, inter­est is only set to grow.

A great exam­ple of this (if I do say so myself) is a cam­paign we cre­at­ed for our client, Dis­count Sup­ple­ments, where we cre­at­ed a minia­ture gym made from veg­gies and then let an adorable ham­ster put it to the test.

What start­ed as a self-sub­mit­ted nofol­low link on Bored­Pan­da quick­ly became 429 new back­links, 28,000 page views, 4,000 social shares, brand expo­sure and refer­ral traf­fic.

The cam­paign even secured a link from the Huff­in­g­ton Post, whose ‘top­i­cal trust flow’ (the rel­e­vance of con­tent) was above 40 in the health and fit­ness sec­tor, mean­ing its rel­e­vance to Dis­count Sup­ple­ments helped their link build­ing equi­ty sky-rock­et.

Do you have tips on win­ning link build­ing strate­gies?