The waveforms of my tracks are small in Traktor

[ESSBEEDEE]

Ah....that might have somethin to do with it...still strange that a wav shows up small but an mp3 is full size....

[V-Hoff]

This must be something configured at your DAW...
This headroom is good for mastering, thats why your DAW leaves it, but when exporting to MP3 there is no need of headroom anymore, right?
What DAW do you use to produce?

[Xonetacular]

Uploaded a picture for you guys...

http://i39.tinypic.com/121ybkh.png

The track on the right has been mastered and optimized for loudness, yours has not.

[Xonetacular]

I use a program called Switch to convert the tracks to MP3, its an audio converter for mac.

And the Normalise option is turned off.....

Again, when you exported to wav from your DAW you probably didn't have normalize on and were mixing to a lower level or you had normalize on and didn't have any sort of compressor/limiter on the master and a volume spike somewhere shrunk the whole thing during the normalize process, then when you converted it to mp3 the mp3 coverter normalized the volume level a little bit.

If you're wondering why your tracks aren't as loud as released tracks that have been mastered, it's because your tracks haven't been mastered yet and it would look closer to the right after the mastering process.