I agree with nwflyboy (though perhaps he's being a bit harsh).

If you want to get into this game, you should start with a tangible goal. "Spend five nights each in Tokyo and Hong Kong in fall 2015" is a good example.

Figure out how flexible you can be with that goal. Do you have absolutely fixed dates that you can't move or is any 10ish day period a year from now workable? Are you traveling alone, with a spouse or do you have two kids to tow along?

Personally, I have no spouse, no kids and an extremely flexible employer so I can pretty much take any award space that comes along. If I have to add two days to my trip to make it work, I can do that. Figure out how flexible you are and go from there.

Honestly, if you don't have any flexibility, this becomes much harder, though you can still save some money (e.g., nice hotels on points while buying coach tickets—in Hong Kong this could still save you a ton of money).

Once you have your goal, work backwards. Which airlines can get you there? How many points would they require? What about their partners (such as using American miles for Cathay Pacific)? Do some sample searches, see how the availability looks.

Then figure out how you could get whatever points are required. Say you choose AA and their partners Cathay and Japan Airlines. You decide to redeem two for one-ways—IAD-TYO and HKG-IAD, buying a ticket from Tokyo to Hong Kong. That requires 110k (or whatever, I don't remember) AA miles.

How can you get that?

Etc.

You'll quickly see that unless you're in a position to run *LOTS* of money through your credit cards, even signup bonuses are unlikely to get you more than one trip a year in a long-haul premium cabin, if that.

Another phrase that gets thrown around FT a lot is "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered". The Chase forum has a number of people who rapidly signed up for multiple Chase cards within a year only to get blacklisted. They got greedy and they got burned.

Start very slow, read a lot, don't rush.