Like many young people my age, I have a prepaid cell phone, where you pay in advance for the minutes you use instead of getting a bill at the end of the month. After bouncing back and forth between a couple of different prepaid cellular companies, I finally settled on Virgin Mobile as my cell phone service provider. I like my Virgin Mobile service a lot, but I find that sometimes it can be expensive with the amount of minutes that I use. Luckily, a relatively new service from Virgin Mobile called Sugar Mama allows customers like me to earn free airtime, which really helps to cut down on my overall cell phone bill.
The Sugar Mama service from Virgin Mobile allows you to earn free airtime by watching & responding to ads, either online or via text message. If you already have Virgin Mobile as your cellular provider, you can get started using Sugar Mama right away. Just go to http://www.virginmobileusa.com and enter your cell phone number and vKey (numeric security code) to login to your account. From the “My Account” page, scroll down near the bottom and you should see a link to the Sugar Mama website. Click that link, then click the “Start Earning Airtime” button on the next page. Now, you’re ready to get started!
The first time you use the Sugar Mama site, you’ll be asked to answer a few demographic questions so that they can send you targeted advertising-but this literally takes less than two minutes. After that, you’ll be taken to your first ad. Most ads are in the form of videos and are about a minute long. For watching a 1 minute ad, you get 1 minute of airtime. After watching the video, you’ll be asked one or two questions about what you thought of it, then you’ll be taken to a link to receive your free minute of airtime. Make sure you click this link, because if you don’t you won’t receive your free minute. It’s as simple as that.
Sugar Mama will also send text messages to your cell phone about twice a week. It is important to remember that all messages sent to and received from Sugar Mama are absolutely free, so there’s no charge for these ad messages. When you receive a Sugar Mama text message, it will tell you to reply with a single word (i.e. a text ad for Subway might require me to send the word “Sandwich” in response). Replying to these text messages is the key to receiving your free minutes. Once you send the appropriate response to Sugar Mama, you’ll receive a text message back confirming that your reply was received. For every two text messages you respond to, you’ll earn one minute of airtime. You receive less airtime for texts than videos because it takes less time to view the text ads.
Overall, I’ve found the Sugar Mama program to be very fun and a good use of my time. Virgin Mobile limits you to five free minutes per day through Sugar Mama, so I never spend much more than 5 minutes on the Sugar Mama site at a time. For a small amount of time over the last few months, I’ve earned 141 free airtime minutes, which is $14.10 worth of minutes with the plan I’m using. Sugar Mama probably won’t allow you to receive your Virgin Mobile phone service completely free, but it can definitely help to cut down on those prepaid cell phone bills which can get very high at times. If you are a Virgin Mobile customer, I would definitely recommend checking out the Sugar Mama website.
