Anyone running youtube channels?

I'm working on growing my channel more/faster than in the past. It seems to be the best marketing money can buy for my retail business. Just looking to connect with others and talk over thoughts and strategies etc. I'm not a large channel by any means. Only 7.5k subscribers(which I know subscribers isnt important). I have almost a million views and what I feel are decent watch time ratios etc.

However I am thinking about making a budget to get this moving in the direction I want faster. I'm wondering how I could spend lets say 1k a month to further this project. Youtube advertising from a couple years ago proved to be a waste of time/money for channel growth/actual viewers. I figure I could buy collaborations? Time with analysits? More Equipment? Give Aways(which I don't think work) etc. Open to ideas and hearing from people on what has worked.

In my niche the largest channel has almost 200k subscribers. THen there are lets say another 20-30 channels with 10-70k subscribers. To get a view of the competition so to speak.

Yeah I currently put out 3 videos a week. My videos are not highly edited or scripted. More of DIY, and vlog style I'd say. I seem to be gaining traction because I actually educate instead of try to game the system with as many 3 minutes videos as I can possibly produce. My Sunday series tends to be 1 hour or more long videos each week. It's podcast like really.

Basically I'm looking for growth hacks. Assuming that my content is where it needs to be. I'd love to be able to find a way to determine if it's worth paying to have a video transcribed, how much are those words influenced in the youtube search. It's been proven they are indexed, but how much weight do they have? On top of that how much weight in the title vs the tags, vs the description. I really should be outsourcing 1000+ word descriptions for my videos and transcribing. But being a niche, random fiverr foreign speaking workers can't do this for me. I should probably try harder. But You can't hire a soccer mom with an english degree to write a great description to your motorcross video most likely etc... Gotta find someone without a unique skill set or not being completely illiterate and knowing about your subject. While willing to work at a price you can afford and they have the time to do it.

I should probably reinstall that. I had it before I bought a new laptop for video editing. I use Tubebuddy pretty much exclusively.

Anyone have any services they like? I'm trying to find a video editor I can use to free up some more of my time. I shot 16 videos yesterday before working a full day retail. Then edited 10 of them after work.. And all that was on easter. I use rev.com for my captions. If anyone has leads on a good video editor I'd love to look into it. I'm not sure what price I can afford for the videos yet, but I have no basis for what it would cost yet either.