- The most usual one is with the help of a symmetric cipher: RSA is used to establish a symmetric key, and the text itself is enciphered with the symmetric cipher. That's a hybrid cryptosystem. One way is that the sender generates a uniformly random $x$ in range $[0..N)$, enciphers it with the textbook RSA public-key function $x\to x^e\bmod N$ and sends the results (of 256 octets) which the receiver can decipher; then both extract the (say) 192 low-order bits of $x$ and use it as key for AES-CTR, which enciphers the text.
- RSA-ECB with random padding: the text is broken into pieces significantly smaller than the public modulus (e.g. 190 octets pieces for 2048-bit RSA); each block associated with some randomness (e.g. 1632 octets) and the two mixed into a padded block by some algorithm (e.g. RSAES-OAEP) typically involving a hash (e.g. SHA-256); each result $x_i$ is enciphered with the textbook RSA public-key function $x_i\to{x_i}^e\bmod N$; the results are concatenated. Decryption undoes that and discards the randomness. This option has huge drawbacks when more than one block is involved: slow decryption, sizable ciphertext expansion (e.g. +15% for large text). In practice, it is thus used only for small amount of data (e.g. the secret PIN number of a credit card).
- RSA is used (possibly multiple times) to establish a shared secret random keystream as long as the plaintext, then used to encipher the plaintext with XOR (or other equivalent information-thoretically perfect cipher). E.g the sender generates uniformly random $x_i$ in range $[0..2^{2040})$ (enough that the 255-octet $x_i$ concatenated are at least as long as the plaintext), enciphers them with the textbook RSA public-key function $x_i\to{x_i}^e\bmod N$; the results are concatenated and sent, as well as the plaintext XORed with the keystream. This is nearly as slow as 2 (there are almost as many RSA decryption to perform), has significantly worse ciphertext expansion (ciphertext is over twice as large as plaintext), but requires no keyed cipher (as 1 does) or padding function (as 2 does).
If using RSA-ECB (which again is reasonable only for short messages, needing a single block), the choice is dictated by the padding algorithm used. In all such algorithms, that can be at most $\lfloor\log_2N\rfloor-r$ bits, where $r$ is the number of random bits added, which determines the security level against confirming a guess of $M$; $r\ge128$ is recommandable. For $N$ of $8b$ bits, a hash of $8h$ bits, RSAES-OAEP allows block size up to $b-2h-2$ octets. For $8b=2048$ and $8h=256$, that's $190$ octets. It is a tad wasteful, but RSAES-OAEP (also known as PKCS#1v2 encryption padding) is the only RSA encryption padding with both a security proof and good support in common crypto libraries.