If you reach out as a marketer trying to do business with other marketer, of course those "50$ per acceptable-to-decent backlink", are almost the best case scenario responses you can get.
You need to outreach to blog owners, as an expert on your field. Your content needs to be mindblowing, some of the best and best researched out there. This content would be actually really interesting and useful to the site owners and their audience, so they might want to link it for free. After all, if your post is a good resource, it's a win-win situation.
Apart from natural ones, 90% of the links that I build are like this. Never payed for a link.
Of course this depends on the niche. Mine can be oriented either towards purely informational, or to selling stuff. So there are plenty of high authority websites about this niche owned by people who dont even know what IM is, and are happy to simply link to a resource that they like.
If it's a hardcore money-niche, this might be difficult. Most webmasters will be aware of the backlink business and won't provide them for free. At that point you need to decide if it's worth it for you to go and pay for what they ask for.
You can always move a bit towards a parallel niche that is purely informative, and base your info content on that. Then collect backlinks to those posts and interlink to your money pages.
- with 3-4 nice posts, which ranked over the years).