Fashion blogging, as you’ve already realised, is a hugely competitive business. You need a huge amount of creativity, connections and most of all luck to break through all that clutter and become a star. Of course, you don’t need to become a top-earning celebrity blogger and maybe if you’re just after an additional income stream, then you may be able to carve out a niche for yourself that can earn you that income.

First, your idea. You’re absolutely right to focus on differentiating your blog from existing ones, but it may not be enough to do so just on the medium, i.e. videos vs photos. Who is your audience going to be? What are the key demographics - age, gender, location - and psychographics - insights about their lifestyle and behaviour? What problem are you solving? Why should someone follow you and not someone else? Video may well be an interesting route, but what are you going to do in those videos and why should anyone take the time to watch them?

Then, taking your concerns one by one:

1. Well done for recognising your own weaknesses, it’s great to acknowledge what you know and what you don’t know, so that you can look for help to fill those gaps. If you know that writing isn’t your strongest suit, then of course writing long blog posts is not going to be for you - you either need to outsource this and pay someone to do it before you, or you should focus on your visual strengths i.e. rather creating photos or possibly videos as you suggest. When it comes to online marketing and social media, if you are willing to learn then there is a host of information available free online; and, of course, you have platforms like Clarity where you can have experts supporting you along the way :-)

2. Finding a unique name can be very challenging! The name should reflect your unique selling proposition that I talked about above in terms of your idea: who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to achieve, how you’re different. You may be able to use your own name, if you are happy to build a personal brand around you as an individual, and this will definitely be unique as only you are you! Again, there are plenty of articles giving tips on how to come up with a simple name that is still unique and relevant.

3. The trend in online video is very much going in the direction of being less formal, more ad hoc and spontaneous. People are doing live video streaming on Facebook and Periscope, while the specifications for Instagram videos are also much less demanding than creating a full-scale professional production. If you’re going to be creating daily videos then you’re going to want to keep things as simple for yourself as possible. You can always get more professional lighting and videographers once you’ve established your business and you have a substantial income coming in.

4. In general, in order to monetise your blog you do need to have visitors. Affiliate marketing and advertising will only generate significant income for you if you have sufficient traffic, while many advertisers won’t even be interested in working with you if you can’t demonstrate a substantial following. To build a following as quickly as possible, once you have those fundamentals in place (an understanding of your target audience, a clear brand, and so on), you need to be creating and sharing search-optimised content, you can do advertising e.g. on Facebook or Instagram if you have budget for this, you can guest post on other people’s sites and have them do the same on yours, you might consider a competition e.g. on Instagram to get some buzz around your new channel…

I appreciate that you are impatient to get going but taking some time to get those fundamentals clear in the first place can really save a lot of time and pain further down the road.

Apologies for the long answer but I wanted to address each of your points! Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss any of them in more detail, whether to get clear on your brand fundamentals first of all, to brainstorm a name, or to define the best strategy to build your following in a short space of time. Good luck!