I had a standalone blog before youtube which had some moderate success and I was fairly well known amongst foodies and pr companies where I lived. I also blogged for my local food market for a couple of years. The biggest thing I learned was that it is very hard to get anywhere with a blog these days (depending on your niche) as more and more people are looking to places like youtube for there content fix. That's not to say you can't succeed, it's just harder. I think the main reason is that blogs have become saturated so much, almost every niche is highly competitive because it's so so easy to just set a free one up and start bashing out articles. Most blogs however, fail in the first 6 months for the simple reason is its very hard work if you want to do it properly, which people soon realise.
Youtube is a self contained SEO machine, you make the video, edit, upload add tags and description and you publish. Then you're free to promote and reach out. With a blog you have to find reliable hosting, buy a domain and build your site. You have to become self reliant in all aspects of SEO, how css stylesheets work, basic html and how content management systems like WordPress work. If something breaks on the blog (happened to me numerous times) you have to fix it unless you pay someone. Then there's Google....oh Google Google Google!
With youtube it's done for you. But running your own blog means you have to watch what Google is doing very closely because you can get seriously screwed if you're not careful. Here's an example....
About 3 years ago I decided to put some of my recipes into 2 different categories, to make it easier for my readers to find what they wanted. Sounds ok right? Nope...Google ran their infamous 'penguin' update, designed to penalise duplicate spam content blogs. It crawled my site, saw it had the same post in 2 locations and penalised my search. So I went from 4000 visits a month to less than 1000, and I never ever recovered from it despite correcting the problem.
So yeah it can be a lot of work.
However......
I would definitely advise having a blog tied in with your channel 100% (Im already building mine). It means you are extending the reach of your brand, and you will undoubtedly increase views and subscribers. My biggest advice would be firstly buy a domain name, don't go for the free hosted blogs because it's wasted SEO juice. A free blog would look like this
www.mysite.WordPress.com. whereas you want
www.mysite.com. .com domains cost around £8 for a year. You'll need hosting too, which you can get decent hosting for around £5 a month. Also the best best best software to use is WordPress, it's the industry standard and most hosting companies will have the option to install it on your new domain easy enough. Or you can download it manually from WordPress.org
Sorry for the long reply, but hopefully you gained some insight to what it's like. Youtube is new to me, but I'm a veteran blogger that's for sure lol. Any questions just message me, I'll help if I can ☺
I like your logo and intro! And I wish to have your accent 