Hi Don, Yes you can successfully modify your bike for not too much money and you can do most of it yourself even if you are not much of a wrencher. In order to gain some modest power increases you can feel, you will have to do a number of things consisting of a combination of these including a fuel controller, retune the ECU, modify the exhaust and the air intake.
I have owned my 2006 since new too. I did not modify it much until my 6 year extended warranty was over. Haven't really modified it much more since. The basic changes I have made are cat eliminator pipe, TORs mufflers, a Dobeck Performance AFR Plus and a TuneECU remap. Paying someone "shop" rates will ad tremendous cost to these mods that could but them out of reach. My cat eliminator and the Dobeck fuel controller allowed a gain of about 19 HP and 10 TQ. Since then I added the TORS and a TuneECU remap that added another 1 HP and 4 TQ.
The cat eliminator and TORs pipes are very simple to do yourself. The hard part is finding them now days. You may need to consider other slip on exhaust pipes as most of them today fit directly to the header and eliminate the cat anyway. Many owners remove the stock intake box and fit K&N filters on each throttle body, but that leaves a little bit of the job undone and requires you to be creative. The better and complete solution is the RamAir filter kit. It has everything you need to do the job right. And again it doesn't take a master mechanic to do it.
Good luck and enjoy the process.
Bill