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Opening more credit lines is not likely to help you out. My wife and I just completed a debt management program with Consumer Credit Counseling Services (http://www.cccservices.com/) and since we paid off our debts our credit score has increased from 617 to 687 as reported by Experian in under a week as our creditors have been reporting our new paid-off balances. At the peak we had 7 open credit accounts and our credit score was below 600. The best thing we did to bring our credit score back up was to go onto this debt management program which regimented our payment over the last two years allowing us to pay off our debts. The two things that changed and thus affected our score were paying on-time every time and paying off our debts.

You will want to keep a tight control on the number of credit accounts you have, especially if you just opened them. Opening multiple accounts at once or opening an account and then trying to take out any other form of credit will likely negatively impact your credit score since you will appear to be searching for money to borrow. The best thing you can likely do is pay down your existing debts. The bad thing is that your credit score has a lag time from when you start doing various things until the changes are reflected either positively or negatively.

I would suggest contacting a local or regional debt management agency to see what they might recommend. I, of course, recommend the Consumer Credit Counseling Services network of agencies since they helped me personally. Just make sure whoever you talk to is not listed as a crook with the Better Business Bureau or any other consumer watchdog groups.

Agree about the credit repair companies. It's not that hard tp build up your FICO. Over 1/3 of your score comes from payment history, and just under 1/3 comes from proportion of balance to available credit. So here is what you do. Pay all of your existing credit cards down to less than 20% balance, pay them off if possible. If you cannot pay them off then continue to make payments of them (not the minimum) and stay under that 20%. If you can pay them off, DO NOT CANCEL THEM, with the exception of department store credit cards or any other type of consumer credit card (Best Buy, Office Max, etc.). Now, let's say you have zero balance and 4 open cards. Use a different one every week to get something small that you would normally buy with cash, say a tank of gas. Pay each one off before the end of the billing cycle so as not to incur any interest charges. You are getting the benefit of the consistent payment history, with the benefit of low balance to available credit ratio, and it's not costing you any extra money to use those cards. Keep that up for a while and your FICO scores will be up there with the best, the right way.