Originally Posted by aeneas3

as mentioned the first thing you want to do is make sure you (and your spouse if you have one) have accounts in all the airlines, rental agencies, and hotel chains that you use.
in fact, might as well get as many as possible. you can use a site like awardwallet.com to track your accounts, also use a spreadsheet.

After that, you really need to decide what airline you will likely be using to fly to your destinations. If you plan on using your accrued miles for that type of trip, it should be a small list.

Next you want to see what airline likely has the best value or ease of acquiring points. Log into your account on say American and search the flights on your usual routes to see how many points it will likely cost. Do the same for the other airlines. There are also charts for this.
It may be easier to get 120k points on American to fly to Peru than on Jet blue.

This should give you a goal to strive for. Then you can look at the credit card offers and see not only what the reward will be but make sure you can meet the requirement to get that offer. It may be harder to spend $5000 in 3 months than 6 months or than $1000 in 3 months, etc.

Sorry if that was little confusing. It may be beneficial to read topics similar to yours as usually responses are similar.

Most importantly, keep reading threads on here and in the respective rewards forums.