It is a very vaulable book, especially with the SEO advice. You can have the nicest looking site, but if you make certain mistakes, it might as well not exist as far as Google is concerned.
My main site, which I spend about $50 per month on works very well. I used ChrisLands.com as the host, because they are built for Books and DVD's and have a lot of nice automation, making the setup very easy. But if not for Aspkin's advice from the book, I don't know it it would be as successful as it is.
You are definitely on the right track. Building your own site will only help to make your business more stable since it is much harder for anyone to shut you down. Even merchnt account providers will normally give you 30 days notice if they want to part ways, as opposed to PayPal's 30 nanoseconds.
The first six months my site existed, I had very few sales - probably less than $50 per month, and was very discouraged. I read Aspkin's book and started referring all of my eBay and Amazon customers as well as optimizing for the search engines. That was about 3 years ago (maybe 2 and a half) and I am now selling $5k+ per month in gross volume WITHOUT spending a single penny to generate traffic.
My best guess is if I wasn't using Askpin's techniques, my volume would be about half of that as a lot of my customers from the site NEVER bought from me on Amazon or eBay.
So, YES, in my opinion, the book is well worth it.
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