Welcome to FT firefighterchris!

As toomanybooks says, you should read up on some of the wealth of information here first. There are many of you who have traveled this path before! Here are some good ones to get you started:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/infor...help-here.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...r-threads.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/chase...solidated.html

You should also look into some of the airline forum pages for the airline(s) you intend to use. No sense in not building up a mileage account.