The main selling point of the site is that it’s private and untracked. I’ve been trying to advertise on Google and they didn’t just disapprove of the ad (nothing explicit at all), but they also suspended my entire Adwords account for “circumvention”.. twitter won’t approve my ads either.
From a functionality POV it’s all working and the current set of features will always be free, so cost is not a barrier for users either.
I’ve created a blog and wrote some articles to try and get some google traction that way, but that’d also not too effective at this point. The twitter account is slowly getting followers, but that doesn’t seem to translate to actual sign-ups.
I’m a developer, but to be fair the site is an online asset worth at least $10k, what do I do to get people on my site? Any input would be appreciated. :)
One strategy would be to write a blog post about how google and twitter won't approve your ads because they are too gay. Post this to Hacker News and a relevant subreddit, and hope that picks up some traction and that someone at google has the power to make things right.
After that, it's probably just keep doing what everyone else does. If you have a budget, you could try reddit ads, snapchat ads, instagram ads, etc. Although, you might have similar problems at those places as well. And you might consider hiring an ad agency that specializes in dating sites (if there are any). I work at a company that sells firearm accessories and we also had a very hard time with paid advertising.
You could go to youtubers directly, and sponsor some videos. Maybe you could find some youtubers that will partner with you and be willing to do more than just the typical sponsored segment in a video.
You could do SEO activites, like content writing for various keywords that you might be able to rank for. I'm still trying to figure this out myself, but people seem to have great success with it.
You might just try to look at what other dating sites (especially dating sites targeting LGBT) are doing/did in the early days for inspiration. I hear stories about how tinder went from campus to campus manually signing up women at all the sororities.
If you don't have a budget, then you're really really fighting an uphill battle, as a dating site is the kind of thing that needs a CONSTANT influx of users, and you can't really rely the occasional viral post if it's followed by 4 months of quiet. My guess is that you're going to need to do a bunch of things that don't scale well, while at the same time trying to raise money so that you can do more of the things that do scale.
Best of luck!