Hi Kat,
You are doing a lot of things right, I must say!
Posting on craigslist or kijiji is good, but just so you know, that's considered advertising and those links quickly become "old, archived" links, so you'd have to keep posting new links there over and over again to get any referral traffic from those sites. But that's still all good.
Blogs are usually a better option, especially if your link is placed within a popular post which will get a lot of shares/tweets or on the Category page, which gives you a permanent placement. Those links considered better, if they stay forever. That's how Google knows that it's a real "vote" vs. advertising link, which is note considered as a vote by Google. Actually, according to Google, you are not suppose to buy links, or when you do you should let Google know about them, so they count them differently. Most big advertising platforms comply with that rule. So that's why you need to understand that not all links are equal.
However, it's important to have a mix of links from various types of websites pointing to your pages.
So keep doing what you are doing!
Establishing relationships with bloggers and donating items for their review is probably one of the most effective ways of getting quality links from blogs that you hand-pick yourself.