Where to pay to guest blog?

Are there any intermediary sites that connect those that want to guest blog (myself), with the sites that require guest bloggers? Ideally ones that have real blogs and not spammy ones?

The only way to do that is to reach out to sites directly. It's easier than you think.

Grab Scrapebox, some socks proxies from a good provider like Ghostproxies, and get the Whois scraper extension. You can scrape a ton of websites in your niche and get the emails for each one.
Then use some bulk mailing software to send a personalized email to them for guest blogs. Filter out the replies with sites that meet your fancy.

Hope this helps!

As long as you have some knowledge of the topic and you can string a sentence together, the only thing you'll need is a bit of creative thinking to come up with outstanding blog post ideas that you can pitch to these paying blogs.

I think you are talking about myblogguest like sites. No, they won't help anymore. Outreaching for niche relevant real sites is the best/safest practice these days. If you need any help in finding real guest posts, then skype me or PM.

Dude, you should save yourself some money.

Just go ahead and hire a virtual assistant to get tons of blogs in your niche, get their contact information and instruct your virtual assistant to do outreach.

If done properly, you don't have to pay a red cent to get links.

Also, you don't have to hassle with middleman platforms.