The effects he was talking about are ones you should be able to access in your recording program.
Read the manual for the preamp and figure out what all those buttons do. Then play around with them and see what happens.
The only baseline is that you want not to have your signal clipping when it's going in.
But, to re-emphasize Atom's point, if you're comparing your recordings to professional ones you have to bear in mind that you are working with about $100 worth of equipment while they are working in studios that cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (not just the equipment costs, but the costs of the tracking rooms and the mixing/control rooms).
That cost difference is there for a reason. If you could get pro sounds with $100 worth of equipment, those studios wouldn't exist.
That being said, read any and all manuals you have for everything you have (the mic, the preamp and the recording program) and try and learn exactly how they work.
Then read up on and play around with eq, compression and whatever other effects you think you could use.