Stumbling around JetBlue’s site, I noticed a feature that I haven’t seen talked about much elsewhere. Called JetBlue Badges, the program allows you to earn badges and points based on what destinations you visit on Southwest. After earning five badges, you level up, and you can compete against friends and a global leaderboard for number of flights, distance flown and badges earned.

The exciting part of this experiment in gamification is that some of these badges earn JetBlue TrueBlue points that you can use toward future free flights! The even more exciting part is that many of these points-earning badges can be earned without flying. In fact, I was able to earn 2,050 TrueBlue miles in just a few minutes last night! Here’s how:

First, sign up for a TrueBlue account or login to your existing one. Next, go to badges.jetblue.com and follow the instructions to join the game.

Once you’re in, take a look at the Badge Collection screen by selecting it from the tab on the left-hand side of the screen:

This screen will show the badges you’ve earned so far. Hey, you already earned the Welcome badge and 100 TrueBlue points; not too shabby!

If you click on the Loyalty category of badges, you’ll see that a wide variety of points-yielding badges are available simply for sharing links promoting the fact that you earned a badge on Facebook and Twitter. This is our avenue to earning a pile of free points.

Click on the Settings & Rules tab on the lefthand side of the screen. Here, you have the ability to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts. While you’ll need to have a Facebook account with friends in order for this process to work effectively, you can simply create a new Twitter account from scratch if you don’t have one already.

Simply by connecting your Facebook account, you earn the Facebook Friend badge worth 500 TrueBlue points! Connecting your Twitter account earns the Nice to Tweet You badge worth 250 points.

Once you’ve connected a Facebook and Twitter account, follow this sequence of steps to earn the rest of your free points:

1) Invite 30 Facebook Friends to Join the Program

To do this, click on the Friends tab in the lefthand sidebar and then select Invite More Friends from the top of the screen that appears. Thanks to the connection you created with Facebook, a list of your friends will appear.

Inviting each is as simple as clicking the Invite button next to their name. I invited a mixture of friends I thought could take advantage of the program and family and friends that wouldn’t mind me sending them an invitation, even if the program wasn’t for them.

Once you’ve invited 30 friends, you’ll unlock four badges at once: the Promoter badge worth 50 points, the Cheerleader badge worth 100 points, the Recruiter badge worth 250 points and the Leader badge worth 500 points.

2) Share Your Map

Next, click on the Map button in the lefthand sidebar. This map will show where you’ve flown on JetBlue since joining the game, so don’t expect it to show any flights just yet.

Even though you haven’t put in any time in the air, you can still share your map to Facebook in order to earn the On the Map badge worth 100 points. To do so, simply click on the share icon in the top-right of the map. You can share the map to Facebook or Twitter. Do both, for the reason we’ll explore next.

3) Share Your Badges

By simply sharing your map, you also earn the Back to Share One badge, worth 50 points. However, there are a number of other badges that can be earned for simply sharing the badges you’ve earned already to Facebook and Twitter that we can now unlock.

Go back to your Badge Collection screen by selecting this option from the lefthand sidebar. Click the Share icon located directly below each badge:

Share each badge to both Facebook and Twitter. After sharing five badges to Facebook, you’ll earn the Fair Share badge worth 50 points. After sharing five badges to Twitter, you’ll earn the Sweet Tweeter badge, also worth 50 points.

After earning these badges, make sure to share them to both Facebook and Twitter, as well! While you have to be a Level Four member – likely requiring a flight or two to unlock – in order to earn the Ten Tweets and A Breath of Fresh Share badges, each of these are worth an extra 50 points, so you meet the requirements now in advance of achieving Level 4.

4) Log In to Badges 10 Times

You can earn a final 50 points for simply logging into the TrueBlue badges page a total of 10 times. In order to accomplish this quickly, open an Incognito Mode window in Chrome or activate Private Browsing in Safari. Head over to JetBlue.com, login and click your way over to the Badges page. At this point, close your active window, open a new Incognito or Private Browsing window and follow the same process. Once you’ve done this a few more times, you’ll see the following badge appear:

Of course, take the time to share this badge to Facebook and Twitter, as well!

5) (Optional) Clean Up Your Social Networks

If you’re like me, you’ll love the idea of earning all these free points but hate the idea of essentially spamming out so many “accomplishments” to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers at the same time. The good news is, it’s possible to clean up after yourself by deleting the posts made by JetBlue when sharing.

On Facebook, you can accomplish this easily by going to your profile and selecting the dropdown arrow located at the top right of one of the “Earned A Badge” stories, then selecting Delete:

A popup confirmation will appear with a useful option: By selecting the checkmark on this prompt, all your recent JetBlue stories will be removed with one click:

To clean up your tweet history, head over to Twitter.com and go to the Me tab. You’ll see a list of your most recent tweets here, with the option to delete listed individually under each tweet:

Adding up all our earnings, you should arrive at 2,050 new TrueBlue points. Once you earn a few badges from other activities, such as actually flying on JetBlue, another 100 points should be automatically unlocked thanks to the abundance of shared activity to Facebook and Twitter.

While a few thousand points alone aren’t enough to book a free flight, this is actually a sizable amount of earnings given how the TrueBlue program works. As a revenue-based program similar in nature to Southwest’s Rapid Rewards, many affordable fares can be booked for as few as 5,000 miles each way. For example, consider this flight from Jacksonville to New York:

At just 5,800 points, this flight is representative of many of the cheap deals that can be booked on JetBlue.

Given that flights booked through JetBlue.com earn 6 points per $1, your 2,050 points would require $342 in spending on JetBlue to earn, otherwise, making this a pretty sweet way to work your way up to a free flight more quickly!