What you might want to try doing is mastering one of your recordings after it's completed.
Usually what I do is record everything as close to the red as possible on the actual tracks. But every time I see that the main fader is clipping, I bring it down a little more to compensate. With the knowledge that eventually I'm going to bring the volume back up later with mastering.

The difference between a song right out of the recorder compared to something properly mastered is like night and day.
I'm not sure what knowledge you have about mastering but there's a couple of ways you can go about doing it.
One is to pay somebody else to do it. It's tough to find somebody inexpensive though that will do a decent job. Although Abbey Road Studios right now is offering mastering on a song by song basis for 90 pounds I think... whatever that is in U.S. currency.

The other method is to get something like T-Racks 3 or T-Racks 24.
(I use both but actually prefer the older T-Racks 24 to the new version)

Basically, you run your song through something that looks like a stack of three pieces of equipment. An EQ, a Compressor and a Limiter.
You start with the EQ and play around to get rid of any harsh mids...maybe boost the highs a little and remove some of the deep bass if the song is only going to be played on MP3 players.

Next you turn on the compressor, add a little extra stereo separation and just by experimenting you start to get more boost and volume out of your song.

Then you use the limiter to kind of keep things in check so it never goes over a set level.

That way you can take a song that's been recorded at a normal level and literally boost it so that it's louder, punchier and more professional sounding...but the limiter won't allow the signal to clip.

There's different schools of thought on mastering... some people say that mainstream radio has gone way too far and people are mastering and boosting so much that there's no dynamics in music anymore. Which is true in some cases (it's called loudness wars... the theory being that the louder a song is, the better it will do on the charts compared to other songs)

All you have to do though is just try not to overdo it. If you see the needles jumping like crazy...you're probably going a little too far. Use a decent sound system and a pair of speakers that you usually listen to music through and know what they sound like. Then use the mastering processors to slightly improve everything gradually until you get the sound you're looking for.

It depends on the music too though. You can sometimes take a kind of lackluster song and give it the 'brick wall' treatment throwing everything up full and completely save something you were going to throw away because the mastering process almost added a sound of it's own.

Sometimes it's a shock to spend a couple of hours mastering a song and then turn off the processor to see what it originally sounded like.
All of a sudden you're loud, pounding song sounds like all the life went out of it and somebody turned down the treble and bass controls. :)

Anyways.. just a suggestion but read up on mastering, take a look at something like T-Racks (get the standalone version so all you have to do is open a .wav or .aif file with it.)
Or send something off to a mastering studio and see what they can do with it.