Interesting question and this depends on if we're talking about the first Crusade and the wave of expeditions 1095-1102 or later Crusades after 1145 which had more of an institutionalised feel.

If we take for example the First Crusade after the Council of Clermont there was a three month muster following Pope Urban's sermon to allow for the message to spread and the troops to be organised, buy their supplies and rally behind local dukes or counts in France. This level of organisation certainly paid off, but only to an extent. The early Crusaders did not travel to the Holy Land by sea, they went by land which meant crossing Dalmatia and the Byzantine lands of the Balkan Peninsula. On the way the Latin sources claim they foraged for what they needed but Greek sources generally assert that essentially they looted and burnt their way across Byzantium and Hungary until they reached Constantinople.

If we split the First Crusade into two waves, the People's Crusade led by Peter the Hermit had no organisation and was led with such fervour and belief in God that they took old men, women and children. They ravaged the Greek empire and when Alexios I was compelled to transport them to Asia Minor were butchered and enslaved by the Turks who must have thought them a bizarre picture in a lawless land that the Byzantine Empire had been forced to abandon.

The second wave of the Counts of Flanders, Acquitaine, etc. sent letters ahead and used markets provided by Alexios to provision themselves at certain towns across the Balkans. Coordination between Catholicism and Orthodoxy allowed the possibility of survival. This successful means was used also by Manuel, Alexios' grandson, in the Second 1145 and Third Crusade 1189.

By 1145 the Pope and St. Bernard of Clairvaux were issuing the Quantum Praedecessores, which was a major innovation in Papal institutionisation of the Crusades. In this epistle document, read all over Christendom the Catholic Church promised to offer whoever took the cross complete protection of their lands and families until they returned and financing of their journey could be made by the seizure of gold or the forgiving of debt. Commonly the gold was seized from Jews, as a massacre of the local Jewish population invariably followed any pronouncement of a Crusade.

By the later Crusades, 1204 and beyond, the land route to the Holy Land had become increasingly untenable. The fragmentation of Byzantium under the Angeloi jeapordised the land corridor through the South Anatolian Coast until Cilician Armenia. As a result the Crusaders took ships from Venice, Genoa or other Italian naval powers. These were not offered altruistically however and the Venetians offering their fleet to the armies of the Fourth Crusade was at such a cost that the Crusaders could simply not pay it. Thus they were redirected at the city of Dara and the disinherited Prince Alexios (IV) Angelos. The redirection and sack of Constantinople by crusaders who simply needed the money to reach the Holy Land, were persuaded by the Venetians to find it in this destructive manner, and consequently abandoned the conquest, left it perpetually undermanned. But that is it's own story.

As for what an average commoner could do when he reached the Holy Land, well, I'll leave that for someone else. Holy Orders were normally restricted for Aristocratic Knights but an individuals destination would have been his own to decide unless he followed his lord.