Today, as I look at my “day job” and my freelance writing practice as my main revenue sources, my web publishing projects (my own hobbies) make up the third leg on my career stool. They actually support the other two by broadening my horizons, but still keeping me within the scope of the things I like to do and can accomplish without a lot of cash invested. If I drop a few bucks here or there on server fees or software upgrades, it’s okay, since it’s my hobby and I don’t have to wait for it to produce ROI right away. And if it doesn’t, it’s not like I put everything on the line. Not going to do that again.

So, from the point of view of a new hobbypreneur, what’s “at stake?”

Certainly, you’re not investing any more in a hobbybiz than you would on any other kind of recreation. Spending $9 on a domain name is cheaper than a movie ticket. Spending $10,000 to design a web site means this better be more than a hobby.

By my definition, any income from your hobbybiz should be something you’re delighted to enjoy and something that you can still live comfortably without.

Once I started writing about the music business on a regular basis, I dusted off spinme.com again and used it primarily to promote my books. From 2003 to about 2006, that site was the hub for the bulk of my income. So I backed into what Darren Rowse calls problogging. The success of spinme.com led to my coaching other entrepreneurs, many of whom used blogs to establish themselves as experts in their fields.

But, when I wound up taking a corporate gig in 2007, spinme.com withered again. I had less time to work on it. And, frankly, less passion. Probloggers are very good at pounding out new content every day to stay on top of search engine results. If you’re not motivated by ad dollars or incidental revenue, your writing style changes. You focus on longer pieces that update less frequently.

That’s a big shift for a hobbypreneur. With money coming from elsewhere, blogging can be a profitable hobby. You don’t have to grind it out to earn three dollars a day in AdSense revenue. But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday.

Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day. That’s where I see blogs fitting the hobbypreneur lifestyle — great content being created by folks who don’t necessarily depend on it for the revenue.

But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday. Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day.

A hobbypreneur is someone who has a “day job” that they actually enjoy, but also loves working in a creative field that just happens to earn them extra money. Some people spend their free time hunting, fishing, or playing Wii. Other people start rock bands, write books, launch blogs, or sell crafts on Etsy.

Creative career professionals spend 100% of their time developing products and performances for their audiences. “Starving artists” that work at day jobs they don’t like might reduce that down to 50%, with the friction of spending half their energy on a career they’re trying to get rid of while they spend the other half trying to get discovered.

Here’s how I joined the ranks of the hobbypreneurs, and learned to love it.

In 2001, I left my full-time job as a radio producer to start writing and consulting. I wrote four books about the music industry and traveled the country to promote them. I earned as much as $150 an hour, consulting with musicians who needed help with marketing proposals.

And then, my wife got sick. Our small business health insurance carrier decided that her undetected genetic defect was, by their definition, a “pre-existing condition.” I had to shut down my consulting practice and find a job that would allow me to afford health care. Ultimately, I wound up at a company that I never thought I would work for, doing I job that I found I had a true passion for. I backed myself into a new career, a great paycheck, and a surprising love for what I was doing.

Yet, I still had this drive to keep writing, creating, and exploring. With the luxury that I didn’t need to make money doing it. After all, my books were still selling at a decent clip, and my websites were generating advertising revenue. So I refocused my attention on doing just the things that I wanted to do. Sure, some of my audience weren’t too happy about it, and they have gone on to get their needs met elsewhere. That’s what’s so freeing about being a hobbypreneur. When your creativity becomes a secondary income stream, you don’t have to worry so much about pleasing every single member of your audience.

I had run into this behavior before, when I consulted with musicians.

There’s one musician in particular who started the hobbypreneur idea bubbling inside me. He was the head of a growing company, but loved playing live music. The entrepreneur in him refused to believe that he would just do that for free, so he got focused on marketing his music just as aggressively as he would market his business. Yet, at the point where many musicians would quit their day jobs and hit the road, he dialed back. And he never complained – all he focused on was a core audience in his home city. Since he got all the validation he needed from small, packed houses, he didn’t need to risk everything else just to try to “make it” as a musician. After all, he was perfectly content with all aspects of his life.

And that’s a trend that is relatively new for Americans. We define ourselves so much by what we do, that it’s so hard to envision ourselves as more than one thing. At some companies, doing more than one thing is considered a horrible thing. Where I was working in 2001, I was flat out told not to do anything else creative – even on my own time – since it meant that I wasn’t giving my all to my job. And I am sure that there are probably places where folks are still getting that kind of treatment.

Still, more of the musicians, writers, and artists I meet through my current work share my own interests: punching in to a fun job, then punching out to do something creative, and earning revenue from both pursuits. Having been a part of the music industry for almost two decades, I can confidently say that some of the very best songs and albums over the next ten years will come from hobbypreneurs – folks who are so secure in their primary income stream that they can create fantastic art, free from corporate interference and free from the commercial demands of finding audiences that support them.

During my vacation in 2008, I read One Person / Multiple Careers, by Marci Alboher. She chronicles lots of folks who like to do more than one thing in their lives, and a lot of those folks are doing more than one thing at once. In a job market where creative mashups are critical to success, employers understand the benefits of hiring hobbypreneurs. Like my wife’s friend who is a barista and a fine artist – so the menu board at her shop always looks nice. Or my colleague who is a trained neurosurgeon and academic writer, who works in a retail store to keep from being bored during lulls between drafts. (And isn’t that what I told myself I was doing when I started there?)

I don’t think this is a contradiction to what I wrote about in Grow Your Band’s Audience. In fact, it’s complementary. If many bands are capable of sustaining strong revenue from 1,000 true fans, why not set that as a goal while developing other sources of income?

In my case, my income streams evolved over the past few years until I didn’t have to worry so much about getting my personal projects to pay for themselves. Two of my books came directly from my audience’s demands to write on particular subject areas. But I don’t know that I had the same passion for them as I had for my first two books. (Not that they’re bad or anything. They just felt more like something I was expected to do rather than something I felt I had a burning desire for.)

Right now, this topic is where my burning desire is. In the same way I felt such a connection ten years ago to struggling musicians, I now feel a kinship to other hobbypreneurs who want to spread their creativity without it turning into a second full-time job.

Will it become a book?

Probably. And yet, I’m in no hurry to make that happen, since any income I generate from that will be a nice “multiple streams” thing for me, anyway. What you can expect here are columns that take what I’ve been writing for other sites even deeper – folks who aren’t just changing careers, they’re defining new job strategies by doing what they love.