An “open” policy online can do wonders for driving traffic and revenue. For whatever reason, many traditional media outlets have a hard time grasping this. In their minds, they want to keep visitors bottled up on their own site for as long as possible.

OK! Magazine is one media outlet that understands online marketing. Instead of trying to fight piracy, they encourage sharing by offering a limited, yet valuable amount of content.

For example, the printed edition of OK! Magazine released today included a full length feature article about Nick Lachey and his Christmas plans with new girlfriend, Melissa Minnillo. The story also included several exclusive photos of the couple.

To promote the story on their Web site, OK! posted five photos with excerpts pulled from the story.

To further promote their story, they made it easy for bloggers to grab the photo URL and post them onto their blog. Note: All a blogger has to do to find the URL is right click on the photo they want and click on “properties.”

The outcome was that at least five prominent celeb gossip bloggers decided to post the pictures. Tens of thousands of people probably followed the links back to OK!’s Web site.

In the end, the new links and extra traffic will mean increased advertising revenue online, increased organic traffic thanks to a better google page rank and more readers enticed to buy a copy of OK! next time they are at the grocery store.