Here's my two cents.
1) Don't waste money on AdSense. It does get you views but it doesn't get you subscribers. See my last suggestion for what can get you subscribers.
2) You are a family vlog. If you haven't subscribed and watched every family vlog channel, START! These are your brethren. Not gaming, beauty, or any other genre. Forget all of them. Ignore them. What is good for them is irrelevant for you. Family vlog channels is all you need to focus on and LEARN from. You need to keep up on what they're doing and CONNECT with them. Don't spam their comment sections. Family vloggers take a VERY dim view of spammers. Instead, make meaningful comments. You want to develop a relationship with them. Don't promote your own vlog channel at every opportunity. Only promote it when it is appropriate and realize that 99% of the time, it isn't appropriate.
3) It is great that you have an intro video and that it is between 30 second and a minute long. Now make a better one. You've got the order of what you state in your ad mixed up. First talk about what kind of things you talk about on your channel ... then who you are (people subscribe to people, not channel) ... then tell your release schedule ... and then do ONE call-to-action and that is for them to subscribe. Don't monetize your intro video. The intro video is an ad for your channel. Don't have another's ad hurt your ad.
4) It is great that you have something on your "Description" page. However, I would recommend you scrap what's there and replace it with your bio. You, your wife, and your baby. You are your channel and, again, people subscribe to people, not channels. Your Description page should reflect this.
5) As you're doing a vlog, be very topical. Watch the news and when a big story breaks, crank out a video about it right away. Don't wait for your release schedule. Immediate release. The video's metadata (title, first five lines of its description, and tags) is key. Make a clear connection to the news story. When a big news story breaks, Google goes crazy with searches about that news item and then typically interest falls off quickly. You want to ride that wave. Now, yes, you will likely say at this point, "But we're a family vlog channel and not a rant vlog channel. Why should we do this suggestion?" My answer is quite simple: all vloggers are ranters. You're giving your perspective on things. Do so with breaking news. Give your "family" perspective on the news item. A little back and forth between you and your wife about the news item, your feelings about it, your concerns, your predictions, etc.
6) If you are monetized, you can use the scheduler to regularly release videos. Always always ALWAYS build up a backlog of videos sitting in your scheduler. Do this not just for vacation time but in case you get sick, your computer crashes, your internet connection goes down, you get writer's block, etc. It also gives you breathing space. If you release a video everyday, fourteen videos in your scheduler represents two weeks of episodes before you have to produce another video.
7) Work on your thumbnails and video titles. Do a YouTube search on how to do thumbnails and video titles. There's a lot of good videos out there about both topics.
8) Subscribe to Tim Schmoyer's "Video Creators" and mine its archive. You can and should spend days in its archive. By the way, Tim has his own family vlog. Subscribe to it! Watch all of his archive. Study how their channel has evolved over the years. Learn from their mistakes and repeat their successes!
9) Make up a flyer. Use yellow paper to draw the eye. Have tear-off tabs at its bottom that has your channel's name and its YouTube URL. Post it everywhere you can within reasonable driving distance. By "reasonable" I mean as far as you are willing go to promote your channel. Laundry mats, bus stops, supermarket bulletin boards, and telephone poles at intersections are good places to post. As you got a baby, ask baby stores if you can put up a poster on their bulletin board. Get a map of your city and mark on it where you've posted them. Once a week, revisit those locations and replace missing, all tear-off tabs gone, torn, etc. posters. Always keep a box of these flyers in your car so when you travel, you have them right there with you and you can post them wherever you go. If you go on a trip, put a stack of posters into one of your suitcases and take a half day and post everywhere there.
10) Take viewers on a tour of your region. Title it "Tour of [your region's name]: [landmark name]". Make these videos short and sweet. Try to be funny yet informative. Do one for every landmark in your region as well as unique places in your region. Needless to say, do these as a family.
11) Go to your local museums and the historical archives of your local libraries and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, and, oh yeah, dig some more. Every historical event that has happened in your region, do a video about it. Again, doing it as a family, take the viewer to the spot where it happened and weave us an interesting story about what happened there. Include as many photographs, paintings, and newspaper headlines as possible to visually spice it up. One historical event per video.
12) After you've done every landmark in your region, email your local media (newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations) by sending them a press release about your channel and your family. Stress that you're locals. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations are ALWAYS on the look out for "local color". If you get on a radio talk show, try to be funny on it. The more funny you are, the more likely they'll ask you to come back again.
13) Lastly but most importantly, collaborate, collaborate, and collaborate. You're a very small channel right now but everyone has to start from somewhere. Your best bet is to contact local YouTube family vlog channels. As you grow, contact larger and larger family vlog channels that match your new size. Do NOT seek collaborations with anything but family vlog channels. They have audiences that are proven to like family vlogs so just focus on them. Always propose an activity for the collaboration and never just that you want to do one. After you release a collaboration video, send links to it to other local family vlog YouTubers to show them how you do collaborations and invite them again to do one with you. Go to ALL YouTube conventions that you can afford to go to. Find out ALL the family vloggers who are going and suggest you meet up for at least an interview of them. Doing it while you're at a friendly restaurant gives it a good backdrop. Don't worry about the sound.
It's true if you build a good channel with quality content they will come. It's like that movie field of dreams except in real life. I don't know why you're so stuck on the fact that somehow creating good content isn't enough. That's all you have to do. Just create good content and then wait for the YouTube magic to happen. I know you disagree with this strategy but I endorse it 100%. Sorry if it's not working for you Jack. It's probably because you don't produce good content.
